One diet soda a day increases type 2 diabetes risk by 38% (newatlas.com)

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 :)

Comments (9)

muzani · 2h ago

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.

codingdave · 13h ago

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.

rashempandit48 · 11h ago

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.

bravesoul2 · 9h ago

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.

PaulHoule · 13h ago

How do you know when someone is high energy?

gsf_emergency_2 · 6h ago

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

rashempandit48 · 11h ago

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.

PaulHoule · 10h ago

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.

rashempandit48 · 52m ago

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.