TimeManager++

Productivity Made Easy

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Inspiration

I feel like everybody has ambitions nowadays. From the smallest self-improvements to the biggest leaps and bounds, everyone has a personal goal. We even have a national tradition at the beginning of every year to adopt one!... only to let it go a few days later. People are just bad at being productive. Even if you have a desire to, you end up losing track of it in a day's worth of everyday, meaningless tasks. While I had fallen into this trap myself, there was one thing I had noticed about myself too: I never missed a deadline. I would come close, sure--like, really close--like, sometimes I would make it a few minutes over like right now--but, despite my procrastination habits, not even the smallest homework assignment would go over a day without my completing it.

I'm inspired by the school productivity model. Maybe it's just because I grew up with it--I think we all did, actually--but it's amazing what can be done by the end of a school year just by subdividing tasks into easy-to-meet deadlines. As a kid, I felt that learning programming languages was impossible. A whole programming language? Far too daunting. But, split that language into digestible, easy to comprehend lessons, labs, and homework assignments with frequent but small deadlines to meet, and suddenly it feels like a walk in the park.

I think the same logic applies for personal productivity. For anything you aspire to do, from a small goal to a game changing invention and everything in between.

What it does

My program allows you to do just that. You create a card, a huge card, something that you've always wanted but something that's always seemed just so out of reach. Then, you make subcards. Steps on your journey that you could accomplish not in your lifetime, but maybe in a month. A level deeper, maybe a day.

A lot of the time you hear about these gimmicky takes on a classic like Trello or Google Calendar and you brush it off as not worth the sacrifices of the quality of life you have on the mainstream platforms. So, I made sure to put user experience first. You don't have time to go fiddling around with a button every time you want to make a change to a card. Make the change instantly with the press of the Enter key. Delete the card with the Delete key. Move to the next card property with a simple Tab key press. Of course I went through the hassle of getting everything to save between runs. I wanted to make sure it'd be something I'd really use, not something I'd drop as soon as the hackathon was over.

So it compares to Trello, so what? Here's what's even better: -No barrier to entry, all set up on startup -Integrated priority labels -Free, automatic sorting (closest to farthest due date) -Automatic list changing (Due Next Week -> This Week -> Past Due -> Done) -Hierarchical task management -Progress bar adapts automatically (Peel half of a banana, buy ice cream, you're already 50% of the way to a banana split! TimeManager++ reflects that automatically) -Collapse/expand a supertask to show/hide its subtasks And much more!

How we built it

I built it using the IntelliJ GUI Form Designer, a liter of iced coffee, and a sea of patience for every little bug that would come up! Of course, the actual coding was done with the IntelliJ IDEA, where I programmed it roughly following the Model-View-Controller standard, with TimeManager as the controller, Card as the model, and MainFrame as the view.

Challenges we ran into

I've never used the IntelliJ GUI Form Designer before! As a matter of fact, this is my first GUI program in Java, ever, and man did I have to learn a lot. The hard way. There were also a great deal of bugs I couldn't for the life of me figure out until I would find the smallest little mistake that had me losing my mind for hours and I would just sigh the greatest sigh of relief while also smashing my head on the keyboard for having been so stupid. I've never pulled an all-nighter like this before--actually, it's been 40 hours now since I slept--but it was an interesting experience, for sure! Reconsidering my career choices.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everything! I can't believe I got it all to work so well together. From the sleek layouts of GUIs I've never once touched before, to tricks you could never learn in APCSA that I got to learn--the hard way--all on my own.

What we learned

Again, I learned a lot on this 40 hour Java GUI crash course... but mostly that I don't want to ever touch a GUI again.

What's next for TimeManager++

So many more features! Now that the basic framework is laid out, I have so many ideas, from day to day schedules to notifications, calendars and more!

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