momentum

The problem

Up to 80% of students put things off, and it turns into a loop of stress, guilt and low self-esteem. In a culture that treats being productive as the whole point, 18 to 24 year-olds get the worst of it.

The interesting part was not a lack of time. It was the confusion between resting and procrastinating, and the guilt stuck to it. People would not let themselves rest without feeling bad about it.

Research

I ran a survey with 12 people aged 18 to 25. A few numbers stood out:

• 66.5% feel frustrated and guilty after procrastinating.
• 50% describe their routine as loosely structured.
• 41.7% feel guilty sometimes just for resting.
• Only 16.7% use any method to manage their time.

One quote said it all:

When I rest I don’t feel guilty. When I procrastinate, I do.

The guilt was never about resting. It was about not closing the tasks first. So Momentum should not give you more rest, it should help you finish, so the rest feels earned.

I kept designing for Agatha: the student who finally sits down to rest and spends the whole time thinking about everything she has not done.

Design decisions

The one that mattered most: a gradient circle instead of a number. A countdown in minutes turns focus into pressure. The circle just fades as the session goes, so you see progress without a number judging you.

• Configurable intervals. 15, 25 or 50 minutes, not one rigid block that breaks your flow.
• Close the loop. Finishing a session brings up a small message and a check, so the task feels done and the guilt has nowhere to land.
• Low mental load. Big, clear actions like Let's Focus and My Diary. Nothing to learn.

What I built

A high-fidelity Figma prototype. I built it from the survey, checked it against Nielsen’s heuristics one by one, and benchmarked Forest, Headspace and Pomodoro: I kept the focus mode and dropped the childish gamification and the rigid blocks.

Being honest about the scope: it is a prototype, not a tested product. No user test yet, and the AI personalization is still more of a promise than a real system.

What I learned

Designing solo means defending every decision without hiding behind a group. That muscle went straight into Abbado.

The survey changed the whole direction. On intuition alone I would have built another generic productivity app. The data pointed at the real problem instead: rest was not a feature to add, it was the problem seen from the other side.

If I picked it up again: a real usability test with five users, a clearer definition of what the AI actually reads and does, and a different name (Momentum already has a dozen namesakes).