Help: Letting users add successes - and pick their greatest for the week - is slow. Am I using the wrong set-up?

My users do a weekly reflection in my app. Part of which is that they write down their success. And they pick their greatest success(es).

The problem is, this is slower than I’d like and sometimes the selection of the biggest success doesn’t work - (often it does, which is even more frustrating).

My current set-up is:

  1. They use a multiline input field to submit a success that gets added to a custom state and gets shown in a repeating group underneath.

    (2. This RG has an delete icon which enables deleting from the RG.)
  2. On saving the reflection one of the steps is that an API is called that converts the custom state list of successes to data types success.

  3. Then a Pop-up is shown in which all the success with the same number (not calculated from time but written to the data-type as a number) are shown in a RG and the user can select the biggest success.
  4. When the user selects a success as the biggest success (or deselect) the relevant data success ID is adjusted.

My main problems are:

  1. The loading of the pop-up is a bit slow.
  2. I’ve gotten two messages from users who couldn’t select their biggest successes (other users were fine, and before it worked as well).

If I can make it work without the pop-up, it’s fine as well. But I don’t know how.

Is this set-up just not the best set-up? Or am I missing something?
How could this be improved?

Any help is much appreciated. Thank you!