Time Hacker

Inspiration

Procrastination is a common problem faced by many students and even adults now a days especially when it comes to school homework. I wanted to create something that is easy to use and relates to my daily life. At first the idea was to have a schedule maker that will shout at you when you're not doing the tasks on time, but because of the time given, I had to shorten it to a simple schedule maker.

What it does

The Time Hacker receives information on what the task or assignment is. For example, the due date, is it an essay or open ended assignment, if it is an essay, what type of essay and so on. Then it uses the steps that I gave it on how to do each assignment and creates a timetable giving the time and date on when to start and finish each step. You can then tick it off the list when you start working on that part to keep track of it.

How we built it

I built all of the backend using Python. I used Kivy to create the UI for the software and a few mp3 files for audio. All of the backend functionality and classes use Python and a few packages such as datetime for me to access the dates and times, and playsound to play the audio. Kivy is a tool to make simple applications and be accessed through Python code. I used it to make the text inputs and buttons and the input is then sent to Python and processed to either output labels in Kivy or send information to other classes in Python.

Challenges we ran into

I ran into a lot of challenges when making Time Hacker. The most obvious one would be time management. The Hackathon only gives us 1 and a half days to work on this project and for a beginner like me, programming a detailed and complete application is not easy. The UI I feel could be heavily improved on if I actually had time to work on some of the art and the code could be more efficient and less messy if I was given more time to revise it. The second problem I ran into was that because I am still a beginner with Kivy, a lot of its commands I needed to learn from scratch by watching Youtube videos and browsing google for answers. Some of which I had to come up with my own solution for. Overall, there were a lot of challenges, but I am happy that I finished.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The best accomplishment that I achieved is the fact that I was actually able to finish this project on time. This is my first time ever joining a hackathon and it was definitely a challenging one. So I'm already proud on the fact that I finished. Whatever result I get, I'll be satisfied.

What we learned

Before coming into this, I was underestimating it by thinking I could finish it in 1 day, but after joining, I realized just how much preparation is needed to make a good project. I joined this competition alone and finished the project. There is definitely a lot more I have to learn about coding, but now I think I have sufficient knowledge to program with Kivy and datetime. But I think the most important thing I've learnt is time management. Procrastination is the product of bad time management and I feel like this project has taught me something very valuable about it.

What's next for Time Hacker

The Time Hacker definitely has long ways to go. The first step would be to add some functionalities that were scrapped because of the time limit like being able to add your own 'busy times' and give a notification whenever you have to do a task. After that, I would have to improve the UI design with better colors and better buttons. Maybe use an app like Photoshop to make some of the graphics.

Built With

• datetime
• kivy
• playsound
• python