Planning Made Easy
Our Story
Planning is never easy. People struggle with it on a daily basis while trying to keep track of the various goals they are trying to reach. Whether it is to study for a test, make a run to the grocery store, lose weight or even planning a hackathon project, it is extremely easy to get lost by just focusing on the end goal. We plan to stop this loss of focus entirely.
How we are going to to it?
We decided that people neeed to start taking advantage of the fact that they can break their goals down into more managable chunks. While many people are aware of this, very few people ever sit down and take the time to actually plan it out. This leads to little details getting left out on the way that either made them unable to reach that end goal or reach an end goal that is incomplete. With Planning Made Easy, we are giving anyone the power to easily break down a goal into managable chunks that are easy to understand and work with.
How does this amazing product works?
It all starts with the "End Goal". This is the big picture, the thing you want to reach at the very end of your journey. Once a user inputs this big idea, they are then prompted with the option to split that idea into smaller goals, "milestones" you may call it. By breaking goals up into these "milestones" it gives users the understanding that there are certain things that must be one before any goal can be accomplished. These "milestones" have no limits and can be as few as zero to as many as your computer can hold. But it doesn't stop with just the end goal that takes a few steps to get to, we want users to break their goals up even further than that. This is why each milestone is viewed as its own goal, which can have milestones underneath it. As users realize they can break tasks into smaller and smaller pieces, they start to feel the pressure of one big goal go away and obtain a set of instructions on exactly how they can reach their goal. It is customized to their needs and has no limits of how large or how small their idea is. This software is applicable to practically any situation someone can think of.
Challenges we faced
Given the nature of the hackathon, we decided to try to develop this idea as an Android app. None of us had any experience developing for Android, so all our opbstacles were related to using the power of Android Studio to our advantage instead of having it be the one thing that held us back. It took us many hours of reading and trail and error, but given the limited amount of time we had we believe that we developed a very functional app that demonstrates the core concept of our idea.
Plans for the future
At the moment our app only allows users to create new "End Goals", create sub-goals and then branch those sub goals into smaller sub-goals. We want this app to be something that isn't limited to one type of goal. We want this app to be universal in it's applications. With more development, we would add more features that each goal contained, such as the DATE TO FINISH it by and possibly some monetary figures that went along with it. We also believe that repositioning goals to better fit the overall approach towards the end goals is something that we wanted to implement during this event, but simply ran out of time to do.
What we learned from this experience
None of us had ever done a hackathon before this one, and we believe the biggest thing we learned was how valuable the seemingly little amount of knowledge we came in with was. Being unafraid to approach a seemingly impossible task by breaking down the parts into bite-sized chunks helped us immensely. We were able to solve the short term problems when they arose and through our persistence we were able to succeffuly make a functional app, something we were skeptical about making before the start of the competition.
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