Poppins is a digital nanny/governess, here to set things in order. A personal habit, routine, and schedule manager created to help me manage several ADHD issues at once.
###Qualifications (with apologies to Walt Disney & co.):
- A cheery disposition. I am never cross.
- Rosy cheeks. Obviously.
- Plays games, all sorts. I'm sure the children will find my games extremely diverting.
- I am kind, but extremely firm.
Changing habits is hard. Over time, they become hardened neural pathways in our brains and almost literally require rewiring. What's more, going against our default behavior (habitual response) saps our willpower. Poppins's goals are geared toward changing multiple habits at once, mitigating the negative effects, rewarding successes, punishing failures, and helping others support your efforts.
Poppins is initially meant to tie several systems together: Find My iPhone, RescueTime, the Twist app, Google Calendar, and anything else that can be integrated with less effort than it'd take to build.
The easiest way to describe Poppins is by walking you through a day with her:
AM
- 8:30 Alarm on phone goes off, but I don't hear it.
- 8:40 Poppins detects that I haven't used my phone yet, so sends a different & louder alarm until I do.
- 8:40:05 I shoot up awake, both thankful for and cursing the existence of Poppins.
- 8:41 Poppins messages me: "Good morning! You've got about 30 minutes left before you need to have started your morning walk."
- 8:56 Poppins messages me: "Just a heads-up that you've got 15 minutes left to start walking...or else!"
- 9:00 I go outside and start walking around the block, which Poppins detects because I've geofenced my home.
- 9:10 Poppins: "You finished your walk...congrats! You can head home now & start the day." ...
- 11:20 Poppins: "You've been reading Hacker News for 10 minutes now. Time to get back to work."
- 11:25 Poppins: "Since you're still slacking, I'm locking your phone & only letting you access Stack Overflow and Google search results for the next hour."
PM
- 2:00 Poppins messages me letting me know I have a meeting in an hour, who it's with, where it's at, and that I need to leave by 2:30 to be on time.
- 2:15 Poppins: "Time to pack up & get ready to leave for your meeting!"
- 2:16 Poppins sends remote command to laptop to hibernate & locks my phone.
- 2:35 Poppins detects I still haven't left yet, sends a message to who I'm meeting with to let them know I'm running late. ...
- 6:30 Poppins: "Time to make dinner and eat!" ...
- 11:00 Poppins: "Time to shut down everything and get ready for bed!"
- 11:05 Poppins hibernates laptop and locks the phone. ...
- 2:00A Poppins detects laptop or phone is being used & responds by sending hibernate/lock command.
I really need Poppins in my life and I'm sure several other people feel the same way, to varying degrees. It's very rare that I complete projects when working alone and finishing a project in a reasonable amount of time is even rarer.
In short, I can't build this alone. Here's how you can currently help (this list may be different from the last time you read it):
- Click the watch button in the upper right corner of the repo to get update notifications
- Create issues for feature requests, architecture suggestions, etc. Share your ideas.
- Fork this repo and start building on it once I commit the initial code.
- Find My iPhone API wrapper to message/track user and lock iPhone (eg. Sosumi or any of its ports: PHP, python, Ruby)
- Google Calendar API client to know schedule
- RescueTime API to detect when getting distracted
- Task Scheduler that supports scheduling with recurrences and/or intervals
- Something to run in Windows 7 that will allow server to restrict browsing, as well as application execution