TrackMyFocus

Track, Visualize and Share with TrackMyFocus

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Inspiration

It can be challenging for people with conditions such as ADHD or ADD to track the amount of times they get distracted and explain it, as these conditions are not always easily noticeable or diagnosable. This can make it difficult for individuals to understand and manage their condition, since it often gets overlooked, and can lead to frustration and difficulties in productivity and daily life.

Developing a tool that helps people with these conditions track their distractions can be a valuable and meaningful project, as it can provide individuals with a way to better understand and manage their condition by seeing a visualized data and present it to a professional if required. By providing a clear picture of distractions faced in each work session, this tool can help people identify patterns and areas for improvement, and ultimately increase their productivity and well-being.

What it does

Contains two components -

  • An app when launched presents the user with two modes - Prompt Me and Tap Me - when chosen for Tap Me, there is an always hovering overlay over whatever the user is doing, when the user is distracted they can tap on the button and this is tracked in the backend, the Prompt Me button however is an alternative to the always hover overlay, which asks in certain intervals to the individual whether they are paying attention, this alternate mode was made as a more subtle tracking method.

  • The website holds the data of the taps, it renders a graph along with a few other details, this helps the user understand how well they are able to pay attention during a certain session. This data can be accessed and presented to a mental health professional for a better feedback and diagnosis of any underlying condition like ADHD.

How we built it

There were many options, we chose Vite + React (for its speed), NodeJS and Typescript (because why not), and used electron as a base for the Windows app which would help track the user's focus. For better speed and user experience, we used Cloudflare Pages. For authentication, we used Auth0 for authentication, and used cockroach DB for it's truly serverless offerings of traditions databases. We used Figma for the designs, and TablerIcons for their awesome icon packs.

We used JavaScript, React, Auth0 for authorization which had pretty easy to understand documentation, plus had

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced while building this project was related to the design, as we struggled to determine whether the design should be muted or vibrant, since our main focus of the project was to help people with tracking their distractions, we wanted to make sure that we didn't become a distraction! We ultimately decided to settle on a mixture of the two approaches, a rather bold UI - to help with the aesthetics with a tinge of bright accent - a functionality to put focus on the main feature.

Additionally, our team consisted of two members @Aishwaryaa and @Rohit for whom this was their very first project and hackathon! Which presented its own set of challenges. Overall, we got to learn and grow from these challenges as they were only opportunities posed as problems :D

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We wanted to aim our project to be helpful and made sure to make a small contribution to the community of ADHD. There aren’t many tools out there to help out with ADHD or its diagnosis, considering the tracking and aids aren’t features that are thought of and get easily overlooked. Even when it comes to ADHD as a condition, it often gets overlooked and tends to be termed as voluntary distraction or that the individual isn’t putting enough effort.

With our project we aim to make an app that gives concrete insight into their focus span during every work session and be able to reach out to medical professionals for any anomaly they detect through the data tracked by our application. We want to help out people with seemingly small but significant aids and conveniences - that is what we aim to do through this project.

What we learned

We learned that it's alright to start from scratch! Not every time would a plan go as per how it was supposed to, revisions are an integral part of a project. Ultimately, revising on the design leads to a better functionality added in each iteration.

New technologies can be hard to implement but with trial and error nothing is impossible, it was our first time trying out Auth0 and CockroachDB, it was quite a quest to understand and implement them in such a short span of time. At times, it might be frustrating, at times we wanted to just leave the project at bay and snuggle up on our beds and call it a night, but at the end of the day, we pushed through - persistence and perseverance is the key.

What's next for TrackMyFocus

Well we have thought quite ahead into the future, among the multiple ideas brainstormed by us, a few included

  • making a web tracker that would track if you were to browse other websites other than the one you are currently working on and or the ones you have whitelisted.
  • One more feature underway would be making a detailed report and letting the user make a PDF of the graphs and data to keep it handy.
  • Maybe also adding a comparison tool to see the progress of focus time improvement!

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