Help

Drop in a syllabus, a brief, a kickoff email or meeting notes: PDF, Word (.docx), OpenDocument (.odt), plain text, Markdown, CSV or HTML, or just paste. The text is pulled out on your device; the file itself never leaves it.

The text is read for exact names and resolved dates. When the reader cannot be reached, a rules-based one runs on your device instead, and the review step says which one ran. You check everything before it is saved: fix a title, change a date, untick a guess.

Overview is today first: what is due, what is late, what is ahead. This week is every course or project at once, seven days across. Calendar has real hours and meeting lengths. Timeline (or the Roadmap, in Professional) is the whole term as one strip, a lane per course or project, with today where today is.

Students also have Plan, which lays the week out, Study guides, which read your notes and say what to study, Study, for flashcards, quizzes and your sources, and Grades. Professional has Projects, Review, Goals and Recall. The number keys 1 to 9 and 0 switch between them.

Press N anywhere. The title field reads dates and times as you type, so “Lab report 2 thu 5pm” fills the rest in. ⇧ ↵ saves and starts another.

Search reads an item too: type “Essay draft next friday” into it and the top row offers to add it, dated, timed and typed. New items can repeat weekly or every two weeks until a date; each occurrence is its own row, so you can move or skip one without touching the rest.

Steps go after a plus: “Essay 2 fri + outline + draft + edit” adds the essay with three steps. Got a lot on your mind? Brain dump (in search, or on the new item panel) takes it all at once, spoken or typed, and hands back items to keep.

Open an item and choose Break it down for its steps with estimates, as big or as small as you like; give them days counted back from the due date, or drag one onto a day in Plan. Plan backwards on big work places milestones before it is due, and Plan revision on an exam spaces sessions out ahead of it, more for the exams worth more.

When a session is missed, or something lands on top of it, Plan offers to move it before its deadline and then shows what moved and why, with Undo. Tell Plan your best and worst hours, or let it learn them from the timer, and heavy work goes to the good ones.

The overview shades the weeks ahead by how much of their free time the work needs, and warns you two or three weeks before a crunch. Up next can be ordered by what matters most to your grades. In the morning, two minutes picks today’s three; in the evening, two minutes rolls what is left forward.

In Plan, draw the week’s slots once: Deep work, Admin, Meetings only, on the days and hours you choose. Auto-schedule puts every open task into a slot of its kind before it is due (the inbox and invoices go to admin; a task can be told otherwise in its details), and shows what moved and why, with Undo. When a meeting lands on one of those blocks, from a booking or your calendar, the block moves to the next free slot of its kind on its own, and says so.

Settings has your booking link: a page anyone can book you through, without an account, for 15, 30 or 60 minutes, inside the hours and days you set, with a buffer, a minimum notice and a daily limit, and never over deep work. People see the times in their own time zone; what they book lands in your plan as a meeting and in your connected calendar, and both of you get an invite when email is set up.

A meeting opens with its notes. Find actions reads them and lists each action with who it is for and when, for you to check; only what you keep becomes tasks in the meeting’s project. Goals holds the quarter’s objectives and key results, a number to move or a thing to ship; link a project or a task to a key result and its progress follows the work. The quarterly review scores each objective from 0 to 1.

Give a project a client and say whether its time is billable in its editor. Time reports (from Review) adds up what the timer saw by project and by client, billable apart, for any dates, as a CSV or a page to print. A project’s page can make a client page: milestones, deliverables and status, never tasks or notes, on a link you can replace or switch off. On a team licence, each person can choose to share how many hours their weeks hold, and only that, with whoever runs it.

Turn on Gentle mode in Settings (or from search, or at the end of setting up). Now shows one thing at a time with a disc of colour that shrinks as its time goes: start it, start just five minutes of it, or say not now and see the next. Two minutes before the end a soft chime and a glow say it is time to find a place to stop. Above it are today’s total and when it will all be done; beside it, the day as blocks.

In gentle mode nothing is red. Once a day, work whose day went by without it moves to today with a quiet “carried over” note, and one Undo puts it back. Exams and meetings never move. The overview can draw Today as blocks with a line for now, in gentle mode or not.

When today is crowded, Make today smaller keeps the three things that matter most to your grades and moves the rest to days with room, showing every move before it happens. Ask for an extension drafts a polite email to your instructor with the course, the work, the date and your reason filled in, to copy or open in your own mail.

Routines, in Plan, are the parts of your day that are not appointments: sleep, meals, the gym, time for you. A routine can be fixed, or flexible, such as an hour at the gym any time between 6 and 9 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Plans, repairs and the time cushion keep them clear.

In Settings or Look, under Reading comfort: text up to 150%, more space between letters, words and lines, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Lexend or Andika for reading, a reading ruler that follows your pointer (or your focus from the keyboard), high contrast, and reduce transparency. They are kept on each device, so a phone and a laptop can differ.

The speaker button reads an item, a study guide, an answer from Ask or the day’s plan aloud; the microphone button types what you say into a new item, an item’s notes or Ask. Both use your browser’s own voice and ears, and appear only where your browser has them.

N new item · / search · ⌘ K commands · ⌘ J Ask Madison · G grades for this course · [ and ] previous and next week · T this week · Esc show every course · ? the full list.

In a list, the arrow keys move a cursor. Space ticks what it is on, ↵ opens it, E renames it where it stands, X picks it out, ⇧ with an arrow extends the picks, ⌘ A takes the list and ⌫ deletes. The moment anything is picked, a bar appears with the things worth doing to several at once: move to today, tomorrow, next week or a date, change course, tick, or delete, each with an undo.

Swipe a row right to tick it and left to reschedule it. The editor arrives as a sheet from the bottom, where a thumb is. The tab bar keeps to four destinations, with the rest one tap away under More.

Settings, then Your look. Start from one of the looks or change anything on its own: the paper the planner is drawn on, the one colour it spends on the checked box and the today line, the display and reading faces, the size of the type, how round the corners are, the set of course colours, a wash of light, grain, and whether anything moves. Every change applies as you make it, and the look follows you to every device you log in on.

Behind it all you can put a wash of colour or a photo of your own. A photo stays on the device you added it on and is never uploaded; a second device shows the paper until you add one there too. Light and dark, and by-the-hour switching between them, are kept per device, as are the row sizes.

Lower on the same page: give each course an emoji, a colour of your own and a name you actually use (the real name stays for calendar files, imports and anyone you share with), and put them in your order. Call any kind of item what you call it. Choose how the overview greets you, including lines of your own that take turns a day at a time, and which parts of it show.

Studio is the add-on for decorating the planner. Open it from the rail (Studio) or the search. Start from a template, or add your own pictures and choose where they go: behind every view or one view, across the top of a page as a banner, or on each course’s cover and icon. Pictures are shrunk on your device and stripped of where they were taken before they are kept; with an account they are kept privately in it and follow you to every device, without one they stay in the browser.

On the overview, press Edit (or E) to arrange it as a dashboard: drag widgets by any part of them, resize from the corner, or use the arrow keys (with shift to resize) and Delete. Add widgets, photos, stickers, tape, doodles and words from the tray; pick several photos with shift to make them match or arrange them. Undo is ⌘Z, and every editing session is kept under Page, Earlier versions. Laptop, tablet and phone each keep their own arrangement, made from the laptop’s until you change it. The week and each course’s page can be decorated too, from their Decorate button.

Press D anywhere to hide every decoration for a while. Printing never shows them. If Studio stops, the planner goes back to your free look and nothing you made is deleted; turning it back on brings it all back.

Subscribe in your calendar (Settings, with an account) hands out a private address that stays live, so everything in Madison shows up in Google, Apple or Outlook and keeps up with itself. Turning it off is one row; a new address replaces the old one everywhere.

Add a calendar reads one somebody else keeps. Paste the Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard or Google link and Madison reads it now and again whenever you ask; a downloaded .ics file or a spreadsheet works once. The calendar owns the name, the day and the time of what it wrote, and nothing else: a type you corrected and anything you have ticked off survive the next read, and an item you edit by hand quietly stops following it.

Connect your calendar, on the Calendar view, walks through both directions with the exact menus.

Two-way with Google Calendar or Outlook, in the same place where this copy of Madison offers it: connect your account and Madison keeps a calendar of its own in it, with every open item of the term and your fixed hours each week. Move or rename something there and Madison follows; tick it off here and it leaves. Delete one there and Madison keeps it and stops writing it out. Your other calendars, a class timetable say, can show as busy so plans fit around them. Disconnecting leaves Madison’s calendar in your account, to keep or delete.

Settings › Connections lists everything Madison can be connected to, with an account. For Canvas, paste a token (Account › Settings › Approved integrations › New access token) and your school’s Canvas address. For Moodle, give its address, your user name and password: Madison uses them once to ask Moodle for a key, and keeps only the key. Google Classroom, Google Tasks, Microsoft To Do and Slack sign in through their own pages where this copy of Madison offers them.

Then say where each course goes: one of yours, a new one, or nowhere. Madison guesses from the names. Assignments, quizzes and discussions come in with their points, and marks fill in your grades. Tick something off in Madison and it is ticked off there too: marked done in Canvas’s to-do list, completed in Todoist, the checkbox ticked in Notion, the issue closed on GitHub. When your teacher moves a date, Madison does not move it behind your back: it waits on the overview as “Quiz 4: Oct 20 → Oct 27” for one tap to accept or keep. Delete something in Madison and it stays deleted, however often the course is read again.

Everything is read again when you press Sync now and once a day on its own; a tick goes back within a minute. Disconnecting lets go of the key and leaves everything that came in as yours. iCloud Calendar works like Google and Outlook, with an app-specific password from appleid.apple.com. Leaving another app? Choose an export under From a file: TickTick’s backup, MyStudyLife’s export, Todoist’s CSV or any spreadsheet.

For schools: Madison is an LTI 1.3 tool. Whoever runs your LMS adds it with the addresses on Madison’s admin page; teachers then publish a syllabus from a course’s Add content menu, and make the course’s study group from the class list. Students open it from the course to have those dates in their own planner.

At work, Slack: type /madison add Draft the brief fri 3pm in any channel, use Send to Madison on any message, choose a channel for the morning plan, and your status says Focusing while the timer runs.

Off until asked for, in Settings, with an account. The week ahead goes out on Sunday; what is due tomorrow only on days when something is, at the hour you choose, on your own clock.

A notification on the device is the other channel. It carries nothing: the device wakes, asks Madison what to say, and says that. The words are written at the moment they are shown, so a notification that arrives after the work is done says so. Where a deployment has no email or no notifications switched on, Settings says so plainly rather than pretending.

Give a course its weights and its dropped scores, enter marks as they come in, and Grades says where the course stands and what you need on what is left, including the final. G opens the gradebook for the course you are in.

Study (0; Recall, in Professional) turns material into practice. Make a deck from a study guide, pasted notes, a file or photos, and Madison writes one card per idea; edit any of them, or write your own. In a review, Space turns the card over and 1 to 4 say how well you knew it: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. On a phone, tap to turn it over and swipe right for Good, left for Again. Each card comes back just before you would forget it, scheduled with FSRS. The overview says how many are due and how long they will take, and the week’s plan gets a short review block on the days they fall due.

Practice quizzes and mock exams come from the same material, in the style of the exam you name. Multiple choice marks itself; short answers are marked against a model answer, and every question says why. Results are kept by topic: each course page shows how well you know each one, weakest first, and the weak ones can become exam-prep sessions before the exam.

The library keeps a course’s notes, slides, readings and lecture transcripts as text (in your account when you are signed in, otherwise in this browser), and Ask your sources answers from them alone, naming the file and the page for every claim. Lectures can be transcribed live where the browser has speech recognition (Chrome, Edge and Safari), or pasted or uploaded; you get a summary, cards, and the deadlines that were said out loud, to tick before anything is added. Guides and decks can be read aloud, at the voice and speed you choose.

Citations: paste a DOI, an ISBN or a link, and the reference is written out in APA 7, MLA 9 or Chicago, for the essay it belongs to, ready to copy or download for Word. Exam days hold the room, what to bring, the deck to run through last, and the journey; the leave-by time becomes the exam’s reminder.

Search (⌘ K or /) is the way to everything, and it answers as well as finds. Ask what is due today, tomorrow, on Monday, this week; when something is and how many days that is; where a course stands; what is late; what is left. The answer is worked out on the device, with no key and no network. A question it cannot answer honestly returns nothing rather than a guess.

Ask Madison (⌘ J) is for everything else: a question about your own semester, answered from it. Answers can carry things to do about them, each with a button, applied only when clicked and undoable after. Madison is never allowed to delete.

Ask it to change something (“I’m sick Thursday, push everything”, “add the three labs from this email”) and it lists exactly what would change first: Confirm makes it, Undo takes it back. The Change button beside the box says you mean a change rather than a question.

From search: Export to calendar (.ics) for the active term, for Google, Apple or Outlook; Export as JSON for a full backup; Print this view, which is a proper page with hairline rules and no rows split across a break.

Share it (Settings, with an account) makes a read-only page of the term: the weeks, what is due, what is done, and nothing else. No account, no notes, no way into Madison from it, and it stops existing the moment the link is turned off or replaced.

A study group (search for Study groups, with an account) shares one list of dates. Its own page, Projects and room, holds the rest. Start a project, cut it into steps, give each step to someone with a deadline before the real one, and each person’s steps appear in their own plan; ticking one off there marks it done for the group. Steps due soon that nobody has started are mentioned, gently, on the group’s page, at the top of your overview and in your digest.

If a shared date is wrong, choose Suggest a date. When three of you say the same date, or whoever started the group does, everyone following the group is asked about it on their overview, where one tap accepts or keeps it. Nothing moves on its own.

The group’s study room shows who is working now and on what, runs one Pomodoro timer for everyone in it, and plays rain, brown noise or café sounds on your own device. A study-with-me link shows the room to anyone, with names only for those who say yes. The weekly league, for those who join, counts minutes focused, cards reviewed and things done; the top three get a laurel for their desk pet, and nobody is ever shown at the bottom.

Read along (Settings) invites a parent, an advisor or a coach to a live, read-only view of your week and what is coming, and the week by email on Sundays. Grades and notes show only if you say so, and turning the link off stops it at once. People reading your shared link or your read-along view can leave a comment on an item with their name; you are told in Madison, and can delete any of them (or show one held back for strong language) from Settings.

Course pages (Settings) put a course’s titles, types and dates, never your notes or name, on a public page for that course at your school, once someone at Madison has had a look. Anyone can use the page’s schedule in one click, and three people agreeing a date is wrong corrects it. An instructor with a school address can publish the syllabus there with its weights; a date they move is offered to everyone who used the page.

Your plan lives on the device, so anywhere you have already been opens with no network at all: the week, the calendar, the term. A line at the bottom of the planner says when the network has gone, and that nothing is lost.

To put Madison on a phone, open it in the browser and add it to the home screen: on iPhone, the share button, then Add to Home Screen; on Android, the browser menu, then Install app or Add to Home screen. It then opens like an app. Signing out clears everything kept on the device, so a shared laptop cannot show the last person’s pages to the next one.

Every delete, an item, a whole course, a repeat, a subscribed calendar, waits thirty days in Recently deleted (Settings, or search). What is kept is the thing itself, so putting it back is exact: a course returns with its items, its weights and its calendar.

Alongside that, Madison keeps a copy of everything once a day, five days deep, on the device and nowhere else. Putting one back can be undone.

An account is free: an email and a password, and your plan is there on every device you log in on. Subscribing, when payments are on, is done from Settings, as is stopping. Your plan stays readable and exportable either way; only new saves to the account and the reader wait for a subscription.

Delete the account from Settings and the account, every plan saved to it and every link you made go with it at once.

Write to hello@madisonplanner.app. Say what you dropped in and what came out, if that is the trouble, and a person will answer.