Project 1 Milestone 1

How much can you accomplish in a lifetime? The average person stays awake for 16-18 hours per day. Doing this every day for 365 days in a year, and every year for an average of 78 years in one's lifetime, means that the average person spends 455,000 - 500,000 hours awake in their lifetime.

If the average person were to complete all their tasks within an hour, and complete 16-18 different tasks a day, they would be able to complete up to 500,000 different tasks in their lifetime. I personally am interested in tackling this challenge and giving the most meaning to my life each day.

16-diem

The app I'm going to make will mimic a to-do list and encourage the user to input at least 16 different tasks to accomplish in a day. Ideally this would mean that each task should take an hour to complete. The target user would ideally be a person who is capable of being awake for 16 hours a day and is motivated to complete the tasks they set out to do.

Since this app mimics a to-do list and is meant to measure the amount of tasks completed in terms of time, it can act both as a planner and a time management tool. If the user is not able to complete all the tasks within a day, it would help indicate where time management planning and skills could be improved.

After each task is completed, there will be a meter at the top of the page that will indicate the user's progress towards a meaningful day.

I looked at to-do list applications and mostly what I found is that they are flexible with the amount of tasks a user can set and accomplish each day. This means that with a standard to-do app, users can work at their own pace to accomplish their tasks. I intend to create an app with a similar format, however with the specific goal of accomplishing 16 tasks within a day and not necessarily at one's own pace, since in order to accomplish 16 different tasks, the user must complete them each within an hour. In general, my app will emphasize accomplishing a bigger, collective goal rather than smaller, independent goals every day. Undeniably, users can set up the same 16-task-per-day to-do list using a standard to-do list app, however these apps come without the benefit of motivating factors such as a progress bar that would remind users of the importance of accomplishing all the tasks.

Since my app will follow the format of a standard to-do list application, this would mean that the user can input their own tasks with the content to keep track of. I have no intention of keeping track of content history, so the app will not save content data from day to day. Every time the app is shut down, any data stored on there will disappear. For the progress bar, since the amount of tasks is restricted to 16, I will prepare 16 different images that change based on the amount of tasks completed. There will be an image of an empty meter when no tasks have been completed, and an image of a fully-colored meter for when all tasks are completed, after which the user can shut down the app to refresh it.

As for the details of building a to-do list app, I found several videos on youtube, such as this one, about how to build a to-do list application in Xcode. I believe the process makes sense to me and should be near my current level of working with Xcode and Swift.

Paper Prototypes

I've thought of two design options for the app interface. Both involve displaying the entire list of 16 tasks on one screen, along with a progress meter of some design based on the layout of the task list.

Meter on top, task list below

Side-by-side meter and task list