Planr.ai

The Planr Handbook

Everything the app does, how to use it, and the study methods behind it. If you read one section, make it the one on study methods — the app is only useful because those methods work, and they work whether or not you use any app at all.

What this covers

What Planr is, and who it is for

Planr.ai is a study and organisation app for students. It does three jobs: it keeps track of what you have to do and when it is due, it turns your own course material into things you can study from, and it records lectures and writes them up as notes.

It exists because those three jobs are normally done by three different subscriptions. Most students end up with a planner they stop opening, a flashcard app with material they typed in themselves, and a recording app whose transcripts they never read. The gaps between those tools are where work gets lost.

It is built for high-school and early-university students carrying five or six subjects at once. That constraint shapes everything: the assumption is that you have limited time, multiple deadlines competing on the same days, and no interest in maintaining a system for its own sake. If a feature requires ongoing upkeep to stay useful, it does not belong.

It is not a note-taking app in the sense of somewhere you write long documents, and it is not a substitute for doing the work. It cannot make you understand a topic you have not engaged with. What it can do is remove the overhead around studying so more of your time goes into the studying itself.

Setting up

You do not need an account

Planr works signed out. Every study mode, the calendar, the recorder and the AI features all function without you creating anything. Your work is stored on your own device and the app reads and writes that copy.

What an account adds is having the same material on your phone and your laptop, and a way back if you lose a device. Instead of a username and password, Planr uses a sync code — a string you generate once and enter on your other devices. It is the only identity the app has, which is why subscriptions attach to it.

Write your sync code down somewhere that is not the device it was created on. It is the one piece of information that cannot be recovered for you.

Connecting your school platform

The fastest way to get value out of Planr is to connect the system your school already uses, so assignments and due dates arrive without you typing them. Supported connections:

  • Canvas — either through the API, or by pasting your calendar feed URL
  • Schoology — with your own API key, or calendar-only
  • Google Classroom
  • Blackboard — via its calendar link
  • Anything that publishes an .ics feed — PowerSchool, Moodle, Brightspace, or a calendar your teacher shares

Calendar feeds are read-only and generally the easiest to set up: you copy a URL out of your school platform and paste it into Connections. The API connections take slightly more setup and return more detail.

On the Free plan you can connect one platform. Paid plans connect every platform at once, which matters if your school runs one system for assignments and another for the timetable.

Adding classes

Whether or not you connect a platform, add your classes under Classes. Everything else hangs off them — study sets, recordings and tasks all belong to a class, and that is what makes the dashboard able to tell you what this week actually looks like rather than showing an undifferentiated list.

Take two minutes over this at the start of a term. It is the only setup step that pays back every single week afterwards.

Every feature, explained

Dashboard

The home screen answers one question: what should I do now. It pulls together what is due soonest, what you have not started, and what you were working on last. It is deliberately short — a dashboard that lists everything is just another thing to read.

To-do

Tasks, either typed in or arriving from a connected platform. The important habit here is not the list itself but how you write the entries: see the next-action rule below. A task called “history essay” will sit there for a week. A task called “open the doc and write three bullet points” gets done tonight.

Calendar

Everything with a date, in one view. Its real job is showing you collisions — the week where three subjects have all quietly decided the same Thursday is a good deadline. You cannot plan around a pile-up you have not seen, and by the time you notice it on the day it is too late to do anything about it.

Classes

One page per subject, holding its material, its deadlines and its recordings. Useful when you are revising a single subject and want everything for it in one place rather than filtered out of a global list.

Create — turning material into study sets

This is the core of the app. You give it your own course material and it produces things you can study from. Three ways in:

  • Paste text — notes, a chapter, a transcript, anything
  • Upload a file — a document or PDF
  • Photo scanning — photograph a textbook page or your handwritten notes (Pro and above)

From that it can generate three different things:

  • A study guide — the material reorganised into what you need to know
  • A flashcard deck — question and answer pairs
  • A practice test — questions in the shape an exam would ask them

The quality of what comes out depends on the quality of what goes in. A well-organised chapter produces a good deck; a photograph of half-legible notes produces a mediocre one. If a generated set looks thin, the fix is usually to give it more material rather than to regenerate the same input.

Study guides

A structured summary of a topic. Best used at the start of revising something, to see the shape of what you are dealing with before you start testing yourself on it. Read once, then close it and use one of the retrieval modes below — rereading the guide repeatedly is the exact trap described in the section on rereading.

Flashcards

The plain mode: see one side, try to recall the other, flip. Best for facts, vocabulary, formulas, dates — anything where the answer is short and either right or wrong.

Flashcards are much weaker for anything requiring an argument. “What were the causes of the war” does not fit on a card in a useful way, and trying to force it produces cards you can answer without understanding anything. For those topics use the blank-page method described below instead.

Learn

A guided mode that concentrates on the cards you keep getting wrong instead of walking the deck in order. This matters more than it sounds: left to yourself you will spend most of your time on cards you already know, because those are the pleasant ones. Learn takes that choice away.

Match

A timed matching game over a deck. It is the lightest mode and the least effortful, which means it is also the least effective for durable memory — see desirable difficulty. Use it to warm up or when you would otherwise not study at all, not as your main method the night before a test.

Practice tests

Generated questions in exam format. This is the highest-value study mode in the app and the one most people skip, because it is the least comfortable.

Take them under real conditions — closed book, timed. A practice test you take with your notes open tells you nothing you did not already know. The point is to find out what collapses under pressure while there is still time to fix it.

Lecture recording

Record a class and get organised notes back rather than a wall of transcript. The reason this exists is that typing notes and listening compete for the same attention: whatever you are writing, you are not hearing.

It is not a replacement for engaging in class. The most useful way to use it is to listen properly, jot down only the things you did not understand, and let the recording handle the record of what was said. Then spend ten minutes afterwards turning it into questions.

Free includes 90 minutes of recording a month, Pro 20 hours, and Exclusive 100 hours.

Grades

Pulled from your school platform where it supports it. Grades are treated differently from everything else in the app: they are fetched to your device and never uploaded, never attached to your account, and never synced. See the privacy section.

Study groups

Share a deck or a guide with other people in your class. The honest use case is splitting the work of making material: five people making one deck each is five times less effort than five people each making five.

The caution is that using someone else’s deck is worth less than making your own. The act of deciding what goes on a card is itself most of the learning. Share the making, not just the result.

Library

Everything you have made, in one place, searchable.

Settings

Theme, reduced motion, and — the one worth knowing about — Export backup, which produces a file containing your data. Since your work lives on your device, this is how you move it or keep a copy. Do it before wiping a phone.

Study methods that actually work

This section has nothing to do with the app. It is the part that determines your grades, and it would be true if Planr did not exist.

Why rereading feels like studying and mostly is not

Reading your notes again is the most common way students study and one of the least effective. The reason is specific and worth understanding rather than just accepting.

When you reread a page, it gets easier to read. Nothing surprises you, every sentence is familiar, and that fluency feels like knowledge. But recognition and recall are different abilities. An exam almost never asks you to recognise the correct page — it asks you to produce the content with nothing in front of you. Rereading trains the ability you are not tested on, and it generates confidence faster than it generates competence.

This is why people walk out of exams genuinely shocked at how it went. They were not lying to themselves about having studied. They studied in a way that felt like it was working.

Active recall

Retrieving information from memory without looking at it. That is the entire definition — closing the book and producing the content is the mechanism, and every technique below is packaging around it.

It works because retrieval is not a neutral read-out of memory. Pulling something out makes it easier to pull out next time, and it does so considerably more than putting it in again does. Testing yourself is not just a way of checking what you know; it is one of the most efficient ways of learning it in the first place.

Four ways to do it, in order of how little setup they need:

  • The blank page. Close everything and write down all you know about a topic, then check and mark the gaps in a different colour. Zero setup, and the most honest feedback you will get.
  • Question the headings. Turn each heading in your notes into a question and answer it aloud before reading what is underneath.
  • Explain it to nobody. Say the concept out loud as if teaching it. The point at which your sentence falls apart is precisely the gap.
  • Flashcards and practice tests. Highest setup cost, best for facts and exam-shaped questions.

Why the effective methods feel worse

Active recall is uncomfortable. You will sit with a blank page and produce a third of what you expected, and it will feel like the method is failing.

That feeling is the method working. The discomfort is you discovering what you do not know while there is still time to fix it — which is the same discovery you would otherwise make in the exam hall. Researchers call this desirable difficulty: conditions that make studying feel harder are frequently the ones that make it last.

The practical consequence is that you cannot judge a study session by how smooth it felt. A session that felt bad and exposed four gaps beat a session that felt great and exposed none.

Spacing

Retrieval works better spread across days than stacked in one sitting. Three twenty-minute sessions on Monday, Wednesday and Friday beat one hour on Friday, using identical total time.

You do not need software for this. What you need is to attempt a topic again after you have partly forgotten it, because the effortful retrieval is where the benefit lives. Perfectly-timed algorithms are a refinement on that idea, not the idea itself.

Interleaving

Studying several related topics in one session, mixed, rather than finishing one before starting the next. Doing twenty problems of one type in a row means you stop deciding which method applies after the second one — you just repeat the procedure. Mixing them forces you to identify the problem type each time, which is the skill the exam actually tests.

It feels worse and produces worse practice-session performance. It produces better exam performance. This is the same trade as desirable difficulty above.

Triage: A, B and C

Before revising anything, list the topics and mark each one:

  • A — you could teach it
  • B — you recognise it but could not produce it from memory
  • C — you do not really know what the words mean

Then spend your time on the Bs. This is the single highest-leverage decision available when time is short. A B topic takes an hour or two to move from half-marks to full marks. A C topic needs five hours to reach the same place, and an A needs none at all.

Be honest when marking. Recording a C as a B is the most common way a revision week goes wrong, because you skip it, and then it appears on the paper.

Organisation systems that survive a real week

The next-action rule

“Work on history essay” is not a task, it is a category, and your brain cannot start a category. It stalls, and the stall feels like reluctance rather than what it actually is, which is an unmade decision.

Write down the physically next action instead. Not “essay” but “open the doc and write three bullet points I might argue”. If describing the next action takes more than about two minutes of thought, it is still a category and needs breaking down further.

This one habit accounts for more unstuck homework than every other productivity technique combined, and it costs ten seconds when you write the task down.

The weekly review

Twenty minutes, same time every week, where you look at what is coming and decide the week’s priorities. This is the part people skip and the part that does the work.

Without it you are planning from memory, and memory systematically forgets the assignment set three weeks ago that is now due Thursday. Sunday evening works for most people because it is close enough to the week to feel real.

Build the schedule from the time you actually have

The classic study schedule allocates three hours a night, five nights a week. Then Tuesday has practice, Thursday you are exhausted, and Friday was never realistic. By week two the schedule is visibly wrong, and a visibly wrong schedule gets abandoned rather than adjusted.

Track one ordinary week first — just write down when you actually worked. Most people find between four and eight real hours. Schedule those. A four-hour schedule you follow beats a fifteen-hour schedule you abandon, and it is not close.

Leave a third of it empty

A schedule with every slot filled has no room for the assignment that takes twice as long, and something always does. One overrun and you are behind on everything, and being behind on everything is the state in which people quit the system entirely.

When you fall behind, delete rather than reschedule

You will fall behind. The system’s real job is not preventing that — it is making recovery cheap.

When you miss a week, do not move the missed work into next week on top of next week’s work. That produces an impossible week, which you also miss, and now you are two weeks behind and the system is dead. Delete it and start from where you actually are. Last week’s plan has no claim on you.

Workflows for specific situations

The night before a test

One evening. The goal is not to learn the course — that window closed. It is to convert the most marks per hour available right now, and the order matters more than the effort.

  • First 15 minutes. Find out the format: how many questions, what type, what is weighted heaviest. Studying the wrong three topics thoroughly is the most common way an all-nighter produces a bad grade.
  • Next 30. Triage into A, B and C. Ignore your As. Tonight, ignore most of your Cs too — a C might take ninety minutes to reach half marks, and in ninety minutes you could take three Bs to full marks.
  • Two to three hours. Blank page per topic, twenty minutes each, timer on. Move on when it goes even if unfinished — an incomplete pass at six topics beats a perfect pass at two, because the exam samples across all of them.
  • Last 30 minutes. Formulas, dates, definitions. The pure-recall things. Do these last because they are the most fragile and you want them fresh.
  • Then sleep. Tired recall is measurably worse, and an exam is a recall task under time pressure. The extra topic is worth a few marks; the tiredness costs you across the whole paper.

The week before finals

  • Day 1 — establish what is actually on each paper, then triage every topic.
  • Days 2–4 — Bs only. Blank page, check, fix the gaps, next topic. Four topics a day is twelve topics converted.
  • Day 5 — one full past paper per subject, timed, closed book. This is where you find out whether you can physically finish, which is a separate problem from whether you know the material.
  • Day 6 — the Cs the past paper proved you cannot avoid. Some Cs never come up; leaving those unlearned is a correct decision, not a failure.
  • Day 7 — your own gap lists only. No new material. Sleep properly; consolidation happens overnight, so cutting it short partially undoes work you already paid for.

When you are behind in everything

Stop trying to catch up on all of it. List everything outstanding, then for each item ask one question: does anything I do now still change the grade? Assignments already past a zero-credit deadline are done, and treating them as live is what keeps you frozen.

Of what remains, do the highest-weighted thing first, not the oldest. Then tell the teacher before the deadline rather than after — the conversation is dramatically different in that order, and it is the single most underused option available to students.

Group projects

Split by deliverable, not by topic, and put the split in writing in the group chat on day one. “We’ll all research it” produces four people doing the same thirty minutes and nobody doing the assembly.

Agree an internal deadline two days before the real one. The gap absorbs the person who disappears, and there is always one.

A long project with no deadline pressure yet

The failure mode is not laziness, it is that the reward is too far away for your brain to weight it properly. Break it into pieces small enough that finishing one is visible today, and put the next action for the first piece in your to-do list now, while you are already thinking about it.

A lecture-heavy subject

Record it, listen properly rather than transcribing, and spend ten minutes afterwards writing three questions the lecture answers plus one sentence summarising it. That ten minutes is what converts a recording into something you can revise from. Notes taken and never processed are the most common study artefact there is.

Note-taking, and why most of it is wasted

Most notes are never used again. They are taken carefully, stored neatly, and then read once the night before an exam, at which point they are a wall of text nobody can revise from. The problem is not the notes — it is that nothing happens to them between the lecture and the exam.

The ten minutes that matter

Whatever format you use, spend ten minutes after the class writing three questions your notes answer and one sentence summarising the page. That is the whole trick. It converts a transcript into something you can test yourself against, and it does the conversion while the material is still fresh enough that you can tell what mattered.

Skip that step and you have a record. Do it and you have revision material. The difference in effort is ten minutes; the difference in usefulness is total.

The Cornell method, and where it fails

Divide the page into three: a narrow left column, a wide right column, and a strip across the bottom. Notes go in the wide column during class. Afterwards, you write questions in the left column and a summary at the bottom.

The left column is the entire method. It turns the page into a self-test — cover the right side, read the questions, answer from memory. That is active recall built into the page layout, which is why the system works when it works.

Most people draw the lines, take notes in the big box, and never fill in the left column. They now have ordinary notes with a margin, and they wonder why the famous method changed nothing. If you are going to use Cornell, the questions are not an optional extra. They are the method; the layout is a container for it.

It is the wrong tool in three situations:

  • Maths and physics. Your notes are worked examples, and a worked example does not decompose into question-and-answer pairs. The useful review is redoing the problem, not being asked about it.
  • Fast lectures. If the speaker is quick, the narrow column crowds you and you spend attention on formatting instead of listening. Write linearly, add structure afterwards.
  • Argument-based subjects, partly. Cornell handles the facts of a history course well and the argument of one badly. “What were the causes” fits in the margin; “which cause mattered most and why” is what you are assessed on and does not.

When Cornell does not suit the subject, keep the after-class step and drop the layout. The questions and the summary are what carry the value.

Different subjects need different methods

Most study advice is written as though all subjects are the same. They are not, and using a vocabulary method on a problem-solving subject is one of the most common reasons a diligent student underperforms.

Maths, physics, chemistry

These are procedural. You are not being tested on whether you can recall a method — you are being tested on whether you can recognise which method a problem needs and then execute it under time pressure. Flashcards train the first thing and not the second.

Study by doing problems, from a blank page, without the worked example visible. When you get stuck, look at one line of the solution, cover it again, and continue. Copying out a full worked solution feels productive and teaches almost nothing, because at no point did you have to choose anything.

Mix problem types in one session rather than doing twenty of the same kind. Twenty in a row means you stop deciding which method applies after the second one.

History, English, and essay subjects

Facts matter here but arguments are what get marked. Flashcards will cover the dates and the definitions; they cannot cover whether you can hold a position across four paragraphs.

The blank page is the right tool. Write the argument out from memory — not the essay, just the skeleton: the claim, three supports, the strongest objection, and your answer to it. If you cannot produce the objection, you do not understand the argument well enough to defend it, and that is where the marks are.

Languages

This is the one case where spaced flashcard review is genuinely the best available tool, because vocabulary is exactly what spacing was studied on. Do it daily in small amounts rather than weekly in large ones — twenty minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday by a wide margin.

Biology and other content-heavy sciences

The volume is the difficulty. Draw the diagrams and cycles from memory rather than rereading them: reproducing a labelled diagram on blank paper is one of the highest-value retrieval exercises available, and it exposes gaps that reading past them never will.

Exam technique, separate from knowing the material

A surprising share of lost marks have nothing to do with what you know. These are learnable in an afternoon and most people never think about them.

  • Read the whole paper before writing anything. Two minutes. You will find the question you can answer best, and you will avoid the discovery at minute seventy that section C was worth forty per cent.
  • Allocate time by marks, not by difficulty. A twenty-mark question gets roughly twice the time of a ten-mark one regardless of how you feel about it. Most people overspend on the question they enjoy.
  • Leave and come back. If you are stuck for more than a minute, move on. The stuck feeling rarely resolves by staring, and it frequently resolves on its own while you are answering something else.
  • Show working even when you are confident. Method marks are free marks, and they are the only marks available when the final answer is wrong.
  • Answer the question that was asked. “Evaluate” and “describe” want different things. A brilliant description scores badly against an evaluate command word.
  • Write something for every question. A blank scores zero with certainty; a partial answer sometimes does not.

The way to find out which of these costs you marks is to sit one past paper under real conditions and mark it strictly. Running out of time is a technique problem, not a knowledge problem, and you cannot fix it if you never discover you have it.

Plans, limits, and what each is for

Every study mode is available on every plan, including Free. Nothing about the actual studying is locked. What changes between plans is how much AI generation and recording you get, and how many ads you see.

Free — $0

For one class, or a light week. 0 AI generations a month, so study sets are made from your own material by hand rather than generated; 90 minutes of recording; 10 uploads; one connected school platform; ads throughout the app, though never inside a study session.

Pro — $6.99/month

For a full course load. 100 AI generations a month, 20 hours of recording, 300 uploads, every school platform connected at once, and far fewer ads. Adds exam mode, photo scanning, PDF export and offline study.

Exclusive — $14.99/month

For finals week, every week. 300 AI generations, 100 hours of recording, unlimited uploads and storage, no ads at all, and priority at busy times.

Both paid plans have a 7-day free trial, and both are cheaper annually. Full detail on the pricing page.

No plan promises unlimited AI. Every generation costs real money per call, so an unlimited promise at these prices would be one the product could not keep — a handful of heavy users would cost more than everyone pays. The allowances are set high enough that a normal student never reaches the ceiling, and the app tells you plainly what the number is.

Your data, in plain terms

The full detail is in the privacy policy. The short version:

  • Your schoolwork is stored on your device. The device copy is the one the app reads and writes; an account is a backup of part of it, not a replacement.
  • Your grades never leave your device, even with an account. They are fetched through the server and passed straight through — never written down, never associated with you, never uploaded.
  • Your school connection details — feed addresses and access tokens — are excluded from syncing by design.
  • Lecture audio and raw transcripts stay on the device.
  • Ads are never targeted using your schoolwork. Your uploads, notes, transcripts and AI conversations are never shared with an advertising network and never used to select which ad you see.

Because there are no accounts in the usual sense, there is also no password to lose and nothing for us to look up on your behalf. That is a deliberate trade: it means we cannot help you recover a lost sync code, and it also means a breach of our systems does not expose your schoolwork.

Questions people actually ask

Do I need an account?

No. Everything works signed out. An account syncs across devices and nothing more.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Every AI feature has an on-device fallback, so the app keeps working with no network and no API key — the results are less polished, but nothing is lost or blocked.

What happens if I hit my monthly AI limit?

Generation stops until the month rolls over, but nothing else does. You can still make study sets by hand, use every study mode, record lectures within your minutes, and use the planner. You can also watch a rewarded ad for more generations, which is available on every plan including Exclusive.

Is the AI going to do my homework for me?

It will not, and that is intentional. It turns material you provide into things you can study from. If you want the answer to question seven produced for you, this is the wrong tool, and the thing you would learn from it is nothing.

Can my school see this?

No. Connections are read-only — Planr reads your assignments and calendar from your school platform. Nothing is written back and your school has no visibility into the app.

My generated deck is bad. What went wrong?

Almost always the input. A clear chapter produces a good deck; a photograph of messy notes produces a mediocre one. Give it more material, or better material, rather than regenerating the same input and expecting a different result.

How do I move to a new phone?

Settings → Export backup on the old device, then restore on the new one. If you have a sync code, enter it on the new device instead.

Something has gone wrong with my data.

We cannot see your schoolwork, so we cannot look up your account to diagnose it — there is not one to look up. Settings → Export backup produces a file you can send to support@planronline.com, and Support covers the common cases.

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