Next Project: Time Budget App

After this post, I just want to continue building apps for me. One of such apps on my list is a time budget app. This app has been sitting on my list for quite some time but I have not been taking any step forward because building this app is going to be a steep learning curve.

This is because the technologies that I am going to use are not the ones that I am most familiar with, also I want to do it properly from the very beginning.

Premise of the app

You are an individual who wants to work on several different things – like you want to play sports, workout, spend time with family, work (that too on several projects), read books, work on self development etc.

Since you have limited time, to do everything you will have to put a time budget to each of such endeavours. Time budget would be an amount of time over a certain duration for example something like 15 hours of family time per week, 1 hour of workout every day, 4 hours of project 1 daily and 10 hours of project2 weekly.

Putting each task to a budget will help you put your complete focus on the task for period of the budget, the app sends you alerts when budget is exhausted.

Since reality always messes up the plans so if you spend time working more that that was allowed on your budget you will need to take out that time from somewhere else.

The app aims to help you manage your budget, track your time and help you visualize how you are doing with your budget.

How the app will it work?

1. The app allows you to put in several tasks that you would want to track e.g work, study, workout etc.
2. With each task you can specify a certain budget. Budget can be daily, weekly, monthly (possibly yearly).
3. The app shows 3 views
   1. Tracking view: It shows all of your tasks as boxes on the screen where size of the box represents the daily budget set for that task. You can tap on a task to start tracking it.
   2. Log view: It will show you the actual time spent and when exactly it was spent for example it show a list like
      8am-9am – Workout
      9am-9.30am – Grooming
   3. Budget View: Show details about the current expenditure and available budget for example
      Task Spent Budget Remaining
      Workout 0:46 1hr Day 0:14
      Grooming 0:30 30min Day 0
      Work 8:30 8hr Day -0:30
4. You can configure the app to reduce time from other tasks if you overspent on another task
   

This is what it will do on high level but there are vaious minor details that will need to be added so that it allows

1. User to edit any time tracking entry so that if wrong task was tracked it can be fixed.
2. Keep the budgets realistic like you shouldn’t be able to track 26 hours in a 24 hour day.
3. Allow parallel tracking where you do two tasks at once. For example you workout with family so covering two tasks ( 1s working out , 2nd time with family) in single time period
4. Allow online tracking along with offline

Plan

Prep

1. Build the UI prototype in a tool like Figma/Adobe XD

Technologies

1. Flutter to build a cross platform app that runs on mobile, desktop and browser.
2. Firebase/Firestore to allow real time update across different devices.

Time

1. Since I will not be able to spend more than 4-5hrs on this per week, I think it can take me close to an year or year and a half to finish the app.