To-Do-er

Inspiration

As a high school senior who doesn't have the best time management nor organizational skills, I find that I often fall behind on work and fail to efficiently complete tasks, mostly because I didn't even realize the multitude of tasks I was responsible for. I was scrambling to get things done, and that's when I realized I needed to change.

What it does

I made To-Do-er to keep track of the user's tasks and help reduce anxiety. It's a program that ultimately helps users reduce their anxiety in an efficient, productive way -- by writing out tasks on a To-Do List, users feel an automatic sense of pride and accomplishment that helps subside worries of inefficiency.

To-Do-er allows users to input individual tasks and check them off once complete. The List clears in between uses, so a new list = new opportunities, new projects, and new tasks.

What's different from the classic paper to-do-list and To-Do-er is that To-Do-er is more convenient. It's portable and can be opened on the side as the user completes tasks and projects in other tabs. It's easily accessible and definitely lives up to its name of being productive.

How we built it

I built To-Do-er by integrating some knowledge I had on ArrayLists and other Java structures. I tried to make my code as efficient as possible by limiting repetition. I used a planning map to help draw out what I wanted to my program to do.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge I ran into was input checking -- I realized there were quite a bit of checking I had to do to make sure the user wasn't trying to break the program (ex: I had to ensure that the items they wanted to check off of their list actually existed).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of being able to make it look as appealing as I did. Also, I'm really satisfied with the way I was able to mesh in some motivational messages and cheers throughout the code, because I think it makes to-do-listing much more humane and real, rather than just clicking a button over and over again.

What we learned

I personally learned more about the impact of a good to-do list and how it can help. In fact, I literally used To-Do-er myself to list this submission as a task and to made sure it got done!

Technicality-wise, I think I learned more about formatting in the console.

What's next for To-Do-er

To-Do-er's next steps include adding more options and subcategories users can manipulate. I would want to make an option where users can CHOOSE to either have their To-Do-List clear every time they run it OR to keep track of all their tasks.

I'd also like to include subcategories (eg. school, sports) that the user can create to stay further organized. Perhaps a game could also be involved for when users take short breaks.

Built With

• java