Created by Stephen Le, Krishna Patel, Maleeha Mirza, and Prasun Kar
At some point in their lives, everybody procrastinates. Chronic procrastination reduces efficiency and has a negative impact on our mental health by causing anxiety and stress. As deadlines approach, it's common to feel frustrated and guilty for not getting started on a task sooner. We chose to create TimeDiscard because we were students ourselves and wanted to solve this issue.
TimeDiscard is a perfect procrastination app that blends many strategies with a variety of features. One of the most effective production methods is the Pomodoro Technique. You can identify tasks, including subtasks and recurring tasks, and set deadlines with it. The Pomodoro technique can then be used to work through the things on your list one by one. TimeDiscard is available as a free Chrome extension.
Our team used primarily JavaScript, ReactJS, TailwindCSS, NodeJS, and Framer Motion to create this project.
We had a hard time debugging the extension due to the variety of development environments between us. Additionally, it was a bit difficult for us to get familiar with new Chrome API features, as this was our first time working with the ecosystem of browser extensions.
We are extremely proud of the piece we created and the significance it has for all of the students. Our project was incredibly challenging and included several layers all the way from design to development.
All of our teammates gained a basic understanding of how extensions are created and APIs are utilized. Creating a browser extension was hard enough, but implementing higher-level frameworks such as React and Framer Motion at the same time proved itself to be a challenge like no other. Thankfully, with precise coordination and research, we were able to pull it off and provide a superior, more friendly user experience.
To expand on our project, we hope to add more functionality or develop an interface similar to the Forest app in the future. Additionally, we'd like to work towards adding more features such as a panel for listing short-term and long-term goals. This will allow users to gain more motivation to accomplish their tasks. In this nature, we would also implement a rotating database of motivational quotes and educational anecdotes to provide more value to the app outside of just being a tool for students.