Always Forward

A Planner For Your Entire Life

The Plan

I believe I have tried every variation of time management tool and have never been perfectly satisfied with any of them at a macro scale. I think Toggl has the best time manager for micro, hourly time management but none of the bigger picture, macro time management tool seem to satisfy me at a personal level.

This is my attempt to solve that problem for myself, forever, and maybe yours too.

The Philosophy

This planner and task organizer is the conclusion of the following thought-process:

1. You should constantly remember you are going to die.
2. How can I know exactly how much time I have left on this Earth and be able to budget it accordingly?
3. A human lifespan can be broken down into just under 5000 weeks.
4. Each week can receive a kanban board, and I can apply some of the same principles in business time management with life management.

Me First, and Therefore, Developers First

I am making this application for me first. All considerations around this application are personal, and only coincidentally may align with the values of others. Since I am a developer, and I inherently try to write code that other developers will also understand and like, other developers should also enjoy this.

I am in the process of building out a CLI for the platform. I did have one up and running in the past, but it felt too half-baked. I am rethinking this. There are life stats you can print to the terminal.

If you encounter issues, I apologize, but it works on my machine. Feel free to add issues, and I will attempt to fix them.

Your Life in Weeks

I have one of these "Your Life in Weeks" posters hanging in my room, and I always liked the idea.

I tried integrating the already built React Life Calendar, but I instead opted to just stealing some of the really good ideas from that library and writing my own version of it. My version only uses Tailwind, and is only 2 jsx files with a css stylesheet. I am thinking about making that its own repo. I do appreciate the author ngduc for creating it.

My version creates a progress bar of your life at the top. Each block in the life-weeks chart is clickable, and provides links to a Kanban board of that week, or even link you to Toggl at that date, if you have a Toggl account.

Desktop Application

Contained in the ./desktop folder is an Electron wrapper for running Always Forward as a desktop application. The way it works is pretty cool:

• It checks the desktop/app_url file for wherever you plan on hosting the app

• If the app_url is set to a localhost, it will:

  • Automatically download the correct PHP binary for your machine, (Unix only; see desktop/scripts/install_php.cpp for more details)
  • Create a copy of the Laravel application in the desktop/laravel folder
  • Build electron with both the PHP binary and the AlwaysForward Laravel application
  • Automatically start the PHP server everytime you start the Electron application
  • For more details here, check desktop/scripts/build and the first 30 lines of desktop/main.js

• If the app_url is set to something other than localhost, it will:

  • Build a plain Electron app and simply point to that url

So this allows you to run the app locally, or if you'd prefer to self-host this on a server somewhere centralized, you could also point the desktop app to that external server.

Quick Start

To set this up, simply:

1. Set the desktop/app_url to your preferred host, (by default it's localhost:8124)
2. Run cd ./desktop ; yarn build

Then check the ./desktop/out directory for the files On MacOS, you can package the application into a desktop app by simply running cd ./desktop ; yarn build and then clicking the .dmg file it creates in the ./desktop/out directory.

I think it ends up looking quite nice on Mac.

Set up on your machine

Laravel configuration

For more information on initial Laravel setup, see Laravel Docs. They're probably the best docs on the internet.

Necessary Laravel Commands

Copy .env.example to .env

cp .env.example .env

Add personal env values to .env

APP_URL=http://localhost
APP_PORT=8124
APP_TIMEZONE="America/Chicago"

Install composer packages

composer install

Install Node Packages

yarn

DB Setup

# Run migrations
php artisan migrate

# Run seeds
php artisan db:seed