Task Kitchen | Devpost

Inspiration

Most people use a to-do list to keep track of their tasks and stay productive. However, to-do lists still often lead to procrastination because they are not actionable enough. Indeed, according to an article from the Harvard Business Review by Daniel Markovitz, to-do lists do not work: "First, they overwhelm us with too many choices. Second, we are naturally drawn to simpler tasks which are more easily accomplished. Third, we are rarely drawn to important-but-not-urgent tasks, like setting aside time for learning. Fourth, to-do lists on their own lack the essential context of what time you have available. Fifth, they lack a commitment device, to keep us honest." Instead, the article recommended readers to switch to calendars. Our inspiration came from this article. After doing more research, we found that the productivity technique to make to-do lists more actionable is called "Timeboxing." We therefore decided to make a web app to help users turn their to-do lists into an actionable schedule. link

The name of our app comes from the slang "cooking" which means producing/working or making something impressive. Therefore, we named our app Task Kitchen, which means that our users are "cooking their tasks".

What it does

The web app is very simple to use. The user logs in with Google and connects to their Google Calendar. Then, the app fetches their occupied time blocks from their calendar and displays it on the calendar view on the right. In the center of the screen, the user adds tasks with the duration of the task in minutes. After clicking the "Pizza" button, the app places the tasks the user entered into the schedule with set start and end times.

How we built it

We initially built the app with NextJS but the Google Calendar API package would not function. Therefore, we had to repivot the project when there were two hours left to React to make the API functional. Therefore, our final stack is: HTML, Javascript, React, Typescript and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

The Google Calendar API was a struggle to do on the web. We first tried using Firebase and obtain the user's access token, but it did not work. Then, we tried to write our own OAuth system, but the API was deprecated in March 2023. After a lot of debugging and research, we finally found a working API wrapper called react-google-calendar-API. Another challenge was the task planning algorithm, which had a lot of complications such as breaking tasks in half when an event is in-between them and implementing break times correctly and efficiently. Although the algorithm might not have the best time complexity, it works.