Crampack

A simple productivity tool idea (Crampack)

I think your high-school education can be broken down into what I’m going to call “cycles.” Every period of work is a cycle – the studying involved in the buildup to a test, the work put into an assignment or project, it’s all cycles. Each cycle has a start and an end, the end usually being the time you stop working on something outright because it’s finished. So, given this idea, we can build some cool productivity tools! (maybe)

I love git.:)
If you don’t know what git is, I can summarize: it’s a system for storing and manipulating changes that have been made to a file. This is really useful in software development, when every change may need to be undone at any time. It’s really pretty to look at a “tree” view of your files and how they change, and really useful be able to tell how many different versions of a file you have active at any given time. I think just logging every change I make to a piece of code has greatly boosted my productivity, because writing down what a particular change does causes me to think “Yes, this is what that does. I did a thing, my life was not wasted.”
So why not use this addictive tree thing to make a productivity app?

My ***&*&*(VERY)*&*&*** barebones concept is as follows:

  • You have a basic structure for productivity: the node.
  • Nodes form chains, the “cycles” I mentioned earlier.
  • Nodes have timestamps, names, and optional descriptions.
  • Nodes don’t have to be progress updates, they can just be simple due dates.
  • Cycles have a start node, and an optional end node. They also get descriptions, names, and a goal. (just some text)

So the point of all this is to represent your workload as a series of discrete workloads that build up into their own end goals. This is because you usually have more than one thing you should be working on at any given time, and most high school-sized workloads have distinct tasks that you need to complete to get to your goal.

So far what we have is basically a journal and a simple calendar/timekeeping thing. I think that this concept could be further supercharged with something like nodes that have dates in the future, milestones of what you should have achieved by that point. (Those would somehow get removed as you added actual progress update nodes and what have you.)

I’m thinking of developing something like this in software form to help with my educational woes that are inevitably going to turn up later in the school year. Or not. I don’t know. I’m not the boss of me.

yet…


Let me know what you think about this, o avid reader of my ramblings. Perfectly good comment box down there. Unused.
I’ve pre-christened this idea “Crampack” because… you ‘cram’ before a test… and it’s catchy. Maybe you can re-pre-christen it.
Or un-re-pre-christen it.

Also: this is very bad, I’ve not read it over thoroughly, and I’ve posted this half an hour past the time I should be sleeping at.
Sorry!