An app to help you achieve better sessions of focus.
Year: Sept 2019｜Roles: Creator. Designer and Developer｜Read time: 4 mins
At some point in our lives, we try picking up a new skill, then after a few attempts of learning this new skill, we give up. This has happened often, throughout my life. I wanted to understand if there was a way I could begin to fix this lack of motivation.
So I embarked on a twofold mission. On the one hand, it was to create my first ever mobile application. On the other hand, it was to make my first application a toolset of methodologies that I personally applied to learn and build Monamies. The hope was that it could help others maintain a higher level of focus, as well as a calm head and heart, when the learning stages became more and more difficult.
Monamies are your focus friends. I gamified building habits that lead to better focus by attributing a character to each habit and having them react and grow based on your activity. The word comes from “mon-amie,” which means“my friend” in French.
So what are these "monamies" and what habits do they help with?
The Monamies Learnata and Creatheous use the popular Pomodoro Technique, which focuses on intervals of focused efforts, typically 25 minutes long, with short breaks in between. The principles are simple. You decide on a task you need to get done, set a timer, work on the task, stop when the timer is up, and take a short break. After repeating this four times you take a longer break, typically 15-30 minutes long. Then you repeat the cycle again.
This technique has proven to help with facilitating longer sessions of focus and flow, and help with distractions when working on tasks. It also gives a sense of completion to the learner as they begin to complete more and more intervals. In addition, you are able to leave feedback for every interval you complete to help summarize what you have learned in that block of time.
So why two Monamies for focus? What I learned on my journey of self-teaching, is that learning and creating are two different practices. You can become a beginner in anything you learn by picking up the basics. You then become intermediate when you start to grasp concepts and are able to problem-solve. But in order to be considered advanced, you need to pause learning and start putting what you learned into use; in other words, you need to start creating.
This vicious cycle, usually used when learning to program is what's known as the “tutorial purgatory” or “tutorial hell.” It's where one engages in a prolonged stream of input information, whether it’s reading books or articles or watching video tutorials, but does not engage in any output in relation to the skill. It can be very difficult to advance beyond the basics if you have not yet moved from learning to creating.
Each category you create displays the completed blocks of time on the homepage, as well as on the timer page. You can also access each individual completed time block in the timer screen, to view your notes or edit that block of time. All the timers are customizable.
Healthina’s goal is to remind you to work on your health. Many studies have proven that working on your health, especially mindfulness and practicing meditation, can lead to a higher impact on your ability to focus.
Why such a simple checklist? After asking friends and family who meditate, exercise or follow some diet, I discovered that we all, including myself, have our preferred applications to track these activities, despite often forgetting to do them.
A simple daily toggle was introduced as a way to remind me, and hopefully others, to engage in health, something we can often put off, even though we know we should not.
We all know that when we start learning something new, that it is extremely difficult in the beginning stages. As we practice more and more, it gets easier. Despite knowing this, we always enter a point of frustration that can be quite detrimental to progress. This mindset can also be a major detriment and distraction to progress and focus. Gratitude journaling is a scientifically proven method to help with keeping a positive state of mind.
Gratithor is not meant to be a go-to journaling application. Instead, it is there to help remind us, that despite it all, there’s always something to be grateful for throughout the day, however minute.
Monamies gives the option for users to track, view, and edit their progress, as well as any notes of past activities.
Monamies was created using Flutter, a toolkit to help build native apps on mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Flutter went live earlier this year. I thought what better opportunity to learn app development than learning a new language, which others were also learning as well. As someone who has never programmed before, outside of building websites, I found the language and toolkit user-friendly and easy to learn.
Monamies is currently in beta and will be released for both iOS and Android at the end of September of this year. I truly hope it helps people learn new skills while maintaining a happy and healthy lifestyle.