Catalyst: The alarm clock for for people who get sh*t done
I’m always most ambitious right before I go to bed. Delusions of grandeur fill sleepless nights, and if only I accomplished all the things I planned to do tomorrow, the world would be quite a difference place. Regardless of how determined I am to create that app or write that essay, my best intentions are never good enough.
My available energy when I wake up is spent on crafting excuses.
As I walk to my blaring alarm clock, set intentionally far from the tantalizing comforts of my bed, I’m hard at work convincing myself that the best use of time is to retreat and accept the embrace of sweet, sweet slumber. And in this scenario, I’m a very effective salesman. I end up back in bed. Thirty minutes later, when my alarm reminds me once again that it’s time to deliver on the false promises of the night before, I rise from my mattress feeling the guilt having broken yet another vow to myself.
Yet, there are days where I succeed. My best days begin with a cup of strongly caffeinated tea, a warm sweater, and the glow of my laptop as a proxy for a sunrise yet to break the horizon. The world is asleep, and there’s no one to text back. I can focus on building or writing or whatever I want to dedicate time and energy to. On these days that start with a burst of focus and energy, I carry this momentum well into my work day. The odd thing is that even though I know this is the ideal start to my day, it’s so easy to convince myself that what I really need when I wake up is to go back to bed. So one day, in a bout of early morning exuberance, I started designing a solution. Catalyst is an app to enforce accountability for the early birds who have a potent, yet fleeting, taste for worms.
An alarm clock for people who get sh*t done
Your alarm is the beginning and the end of your day. You set it before you go to bed, with the intent on delivering upon an obligation when you wake up. Whether it’s a morning run, a warm breakfast, or a punctual arrival to the office, you’re holding yourself accountable to a promise made the night before. However, your phone is a portal of infinite possibility. Once you turn off your alarm, you have a world of distraction at your disposal immediately as you close the app. So what if you tied your alarm to the first thing you wanted to do that day? You’d be able to wake up, remind yourself what you committed to the night before, and execute upon it without succumbing to the temptation of scrolling through Twitter or Instagram. Once you’ve declared victory, you’d carry that momentum into your day.
Catalyst was inspired by a habit I’d built to hold myself accountable to my prior night’s ambitions. Every night, I’d write a few to-do’s on a post-it and place it on my phone for when I woke up. Once I’d accomplished the items on the post-it, I’d check them off and carry on with my day.
The main screen of the app is meant to set the intention of the morning and to remind the user that they’re waking up to do something. Abril Fatface was used to draw attention to the prompts while Raleway was chosen to give the inputs clarity and elegance. The UI is meant to minimize the user’s cognitive load, as they’re right about to go to bed to replenish their energy so that they can tackle the challenges of tomorrow.
A soothing confirmation screen is displayed to allow the user to go to bed knowing that their alarm can be trusted to wake them up. This screen is necessary because of iOS restrictions on triggering sounds while the app isn’t active. This is one of the reasons why the Sleep Cycle app uses your microphone while you sleep: not only does it track any disturbances in your slumber, it also allows the app to remain in the foreground and trigger the alarm at the appropriate time.
When you wake up, you get a reminder of what you committed to the night before as they turn off their alarm. Note that there is no option to snooze.
Once reminded of what they want to accomplish, the user is free to pursue their tasks until completion. Users can declare victory or defeat, and are free to carry on with their day from that point forward. If a user exits this screen before declaring victory, its counted as an automatic defeat. We’re assuming that any use of other apps on your phone is a distraction and will compromise your morning. If they got distracted with something other than their phone, they can humbly admit defeat. Don’t worry, there’s always tomorrow.
When users start a streak of victory, they’ll be more likely to continue it. When they’re made aware that they’ve failed, they’ll take action to fix it. I’m trusting that users who are already masochistic enough to wake up early to do work will be motivated to break bad streaks instead of just giving up entirely.
Next steps
Your alarm is the beginning and the end of every day, and this means that every day begins and ends with an interaction on your phone. How else can you use this to break bad habits and build good ones? How else can you create accountability mechanisms for yourself? What could you achieve if only you had a catalyst? Besides being a way to produce more output outside of my day job, Catalyst is an exploration around how you can tie specific behaviors to an everyday ritual: setting your alarm and waking up to it.
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