Since March 19th, I’ve been coding my first app I intend to let others use. It’s taken me a little longer than expected which I will attribute to having to learn something new on every technical layer. I will be releasing it soon, but I have 2 major bugs, 1 additional feature, and some testing to do before I release it to pre-alpha and get some feedback. I’ve learned a lot about technologies I’m interested in so that has been a huge benefit, but I’ve learned a few other things.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, I’ve increasingly started crafting my schedule around the tasks that are most important to me instead of using an hourly schedule. I didn’t have a job so that had been mostly a breeze. Whether that time was spent with my son or coding up Renotify. I liked to have a series of tasks that I must complete in a two week period with time markers on when a task should be completed. Often times I completed the quickest tasks at the beginning of the week. Tasks I didn’t know how long would take to complete were spread throughout the period. Lastly, tasks I knew would take a significant amount of time I broke up into smaller tasks and I knocked them out in blocks throughout a normal day. The pleasant part was I’ve started doing healthier things such as working out, eating better, and investing more time with my son. Now I’m more excited about completing things on my task list.

The unfortunate problem was that many nonpriority tasks were missed. I increasingly needed to be notified to do them or I delegate it to technology which is one of the reasons I built Renotify. Technology that saves me time has become more valuable because I can spend time doing things I want to do. I save a lot of time telling voice assistants to do tasks for me. I think that increase in saving time should be added to reminder tools.

The last thing I’ve learned from creating this app is I’ve started to enjoy focusing on fewer tasks so much I now budget for tools that I know will actively save me time. For example, asistants and algorithms have made it super easy to save time on physical tasks that take less than 5 minutes: searching for music via Spotify playlists, turning on/off lights, or restarting a show where I last watched.

I have learned a lot in the past few months from only this project. I can’t wait to see what I learn in the future.