An app that schedules your most important tasks around your peak energy levels | Hacker News Reader

An app that schedules your most important tasks around your peak energy levels

What do you think about a tool that can plan & schedule your most important tasks around your personal energy level and peaks?

Often times I feel my most important tasks are performed when I am quite low energy wise which leads to poor productivity and output.

I’m thinking about building an app that figures out your “high energy” times—like when you’re most alert or creative—& helps you schedule focused work

Do you think a tool like this would help you?

Would love honest thoughts about this :)

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There is something like this in Supermemo (flashcard program, like Anki). But it need a lot of data like your sleep time, historical result of your study (at what hours you answer more correctly), etc. [1][2]

But to me this ideas feels like procrastination by building anti procrastination apps. To most people, Pomodoro timer is enough.

If you really want to make that app, just be aware that the rabbit holes can be quite deep. Good luck OP!

[1] Planning a perfect productive day without stress https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Planning_a_perfect_productive_da...

[2] Natural creativity cycle https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Natural_creativity_cycle

I think an app that schedules tasks around when you’re most energized could really boost productivity. But I get the concerns about tracking data. It might make sense to lean into some more passive methods for gathering info. Like, maybe use the sensors on our phones to keep tabs on activity, sleep, and location to figure out when we’re hitting our peaks. Also, it could be cool to add some gamification—like giving users points for checking in on their energy levels or for knocking out tasks when they’re firing on all cylinders. That could help keep people engaged with the app and make it more useful.

Thanks for the suggestion. Thats super interesting. Gamification does help with more engagement with the app. Will try to work on this after the first version :)

Glad it helps you

How would the app know your high energy times? My phone sits idly on a desk while I am actively working, while I am sleeping, while I am out on a walk, while I am painting, swimming, or canoeing around a lake. To my phone, those all look exactly the same. So unless you tell me to actually pick up and use my phone more often, or to tell it what I am doing... both of which I would reject... I'm not seeing how it can figure out my energetic times.

Those are valid points. Here would be my simple approach (tell me if you think it doesn't make sense or needs some adjustments):

Short, occasional check-ins: The app could nudge you (maybe just once in the morning, afternoon, and evening for a week) to rate how you’re feeling, with a tap or two — think 2 seconds, not 2 minutes.

Learn from your habits: After this “trial week,” the app would look for patterns. For example, if you usually feel sharp at 10am, that gets noted. No need to keep checking in all the time.

I imagine you'd have to log and it finds a pattern. Problem is it can be related to factors the app doesnt have data on.

Another potential idea is biometrics I.e. what sports watches do. Not sure if that stuff is voodoo or real tho.

For a first version, i imagine relying on week's data of user logs and pattern would be a good start. If can potentially iron out other factors that can affect the energy levels.

Yup, I've wanted to make something like this. There's focus vs creativity periods. The brain focuses better when tired, but people's cycles are very different. So it's best to just prompt them how they feel periodically and whether the task was a good fit. This is similar to how they did the research that uncovered the concept of being in flow.

Thats a good idea. Thanks for the feedback.

How do you know when someone is high energy?

Another fair point! The truth is, everyone’s ‘high energy’ is a little different. What my period of high energy is could be very different from yours. Its highly personalized hence we would require the user input here, what they think works best for them. Get their feedback on their energy levels through the day (asking them few times a day) and then sort of predict their high-productive hours for them to schedule their most important work during that time. Let me know if this sounds stupid or if it makes some sense.

You should try making an app for yourself that pings you periodically about your energy level and gather a few weeks worth of data and see how it goes, that's what I think. I guess that's an issue for an app that would be used by many -- it would take a serious commitment from somebody to collect enough data to be useful.

Yeah i see what you are saying. Will try to figure out if we can manage a basic version initially with as less data from user as possible yet still being effective and valuable to user.

Ooo very relevant q

For cheap.. Have him share his EEG+CGM RT readings

Midterm outlook (multimodal data fusion/pretraining):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727191

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