How Akada works

Setup asks for your courses and your term. Search for each course, pick your section, and the instructor and class time come with it. Then do these three things and leave the rest alone for now.

• Get your deadlines in. The quickest way is to hand Claude your course outlines (how). Otherwise add them on Tasks. Put the page count on readings and the weight on exams, because that is what the app works from.
• Start the timer when you study. Press Start on Today. If the timer never runs, the app knows nothing about your hours.
• Answer recall when it shows up. A day after you finish a reading it comes back on Today as a question. A few a day, a couple of minutes.

Everything else, the countdowns, your reading in hours, Stats and the Record, works itself out from those three.

The home screen. Up next is the next session: one thing to do now, a line saying why it is the one, how long to give it tonight and what to start with. What is due by tomorrow comes first. In the two weeks before anything worth a fifth of the grade or more, like a midterm, a session on that course comes up every few days, closer together as the day nears, starting with that course's recall when it has some. The night before, it comes first until it has had its session. Start begins it at the length shown, or tap Another length. Not now sets it aside until tomorrow, and the two under Or are one tap to put up next or to start. Under them are recall, anything overdue or due today, and your courses with their weekly goal drawn as small strokes, one per hour, so you can see which course you have been ignoring.

Coming counts down to anything that carries marks, and turns your unread pages into hours at your own reading speed. “Four readings” becomes “about six hours of reading before Thursday”, which is the thing you actually need to know.

A task has a due date, a course and a priority. It can also have a kind, and this is the part people skip and shouldn't:

• Reading takes a page count. That is what lets Akada tell you your reading in hours rather than in a pile.
• Exam takes a weight, like 30%. It gets counted down to on Today, and it pulls your recall forward so you are asked again before it. One worth a fifth of the grade or more also brings its course up on Up next every few days in the two weeks before it.
• Everything else is a plain task.

Finished tasks fade rather than disappearing, so the list still shows what the week looked like.

Press Start on Up next to begin at the length it shows, or Another length for a block of 25, 45 or 60 minutes, or Untimed if you just want it to run. The play mark beside any task or course asks for a length the same way. While it runs a small branching drawing grows in the course's colour, so there is something to look at that isn't a clock ticking down. In Settings it can be a jellyfish instead, or the deep: an ocean you sink through as you study, filling with animals nobody else will see, or a wood that grows up round the tree the longer you sit. Take a break from the timer screen; when you end it, the next block waits at zero until you press Start.

When you stop, it asks for a line about what you did. Write one. Those lines are your Stats journal, and you can keep one for recall.

Open a course and tell it how the course is marked: the quizzes, the midterm, the final and what each is worth. Say how it is marked copies a message for Claude to read the weights off the outline, and nothing counts until you accept what it found. Or type them in yourself.

As marks come back, write them in. The number at the top is your grade out of what has been marked so far, not out of 100. If you got 80% on a quiz worth 10, you are on 80%, not 8%. It also knows the rules where not everything counts, like best six of seven quizzes.

The hours say how long you sat there. Recall asks whether any of it stuck.

When you tick off a reading, it comes back the next day on Today as a question. Answer it from memory with the book shut, then say how it went: clear, hazy or gone. Clear pushes it further away (a day, then 3, 7, 16, 35). Hazy or gone brings it back soon. You can keep anything else too, like a formula or a line from the end of a session.

ask Claude on a card copies a message so Claude can quiz you on it properly instead of you marking your own homework.

A shelf for study notes. Write one, paste one in, drop a text file on the page, or have Claude write one straight onto the shelf. The reader remembers where you stopped, and a note linked to a task can be studied with the timer running. Claude can also send you a quiz on your notes, which you take on the same shelf.

Stats is the honest one: a heatmap of every day you studied, you against last week, the records to beat, and a journal of every session.

Record is the fun one, and it shows up after your first session. Every 40 minutes on a course inks a tally on that course's page, and 15 tallies bind the page. Your run is counted in weeks, not days, so missing a Saturday costs nothing. Stamps are struck as the term adds up. It is all worked out from your sessions, so there is nothing to keep up.

If you use Claude, connect Akada to it once and from then on just talk to it. It can read your planner and write into it. In Claude, open Customize, then Connectors, search for Akada, press Connect and sign in.

Then attach a course outline and ask it to put everything into Akada. Every quiz, assignment, reading and exam goes in with its date and weight. Akada in Claude has more things to ask and says exactly what happens to your data.

• Put it on your phone. Open Akada in your phone's browser and use Add to Home Screen. It opens like an app.
• Late nights count for the right day. In Settings you can say your day ends as late as 9am, so a 2am session goes on the day you were still living in.
• Make it look how you like. Settings has five paper colours, including a dark one for night, and a few fonts.
• Your data is yours. Settings exports every session as a spreadsheet, and deleting your account deletes everything. The privacy page has the detail.

Stuck on anything? Write to ali.abid44444@gmail.com and a person will answer. Or go back to the front page.