Today

The idea

Most planners fail in the same place, and it is not a missing feature. It is the typing. You copy dates off a syllabus or a schedule, and then you keep copying, because a planner is only true for as long as somebody maintains it. Studies of student planners put the drop-off at around the third week of a semester; across habit and planning apps generally, most people stop within a few months.

Today does not ask you to type your schedule, because your material already states it. A meeting workbook says which weeks it covers. A study article prints the week it is studied. When you import one, those dates come in with it — and Today reads them.

What you see

• Your practice, first — Reflection and Reading, with where you actually stand: whether today is done, the run of days behind it, and the next chapters in your plan.
• What’s coming — the material from your library, grouped into This week, Coming up and Earlier. Each row opens that section.

Reach it from the Today button in the bar at the bottom of your phone, or from Explore → Today on a larger screen.

The Today button

Tapping it opens a sheet rather than taking you somewhere, so you can look without losing your place. It carries:

• the week, with a dot under each day you kept — a streak is made of exactly those days, so that is where they are shown
• Reflection and Reading, each saying where you stand rather than just naming themselves
• up to three things from this week’s material
• All of today, which opens the full page

Where the dates come from

From the publication, and from nowhere else. When a file is imported, its week labels are read and then checked against the calendar — every week has to begin on the right day and span seven of them. A week that does not check out keeps its label and is reported as undated.

That refusal is deliberate. A comment filed under the wrong week will not be found, and you will not know to go looking for it. Undated is recoverable; wrongly dated is not.

If it looks empty

Today reads the library on the device you are using, because that is where imported publications are kept. So a phone that has not imported anything shows nothing to come, even when your laptop shows plenty. Import there too, or use the library transfer, and the dates arrive with the file.

Material that states no date at all — a colleague’s notes, something you wrote yourself — does not appear here. It is not lost; it simply does not claim to belong to a week.

What it does not do yet

Worth saying plainly, so you are not looking for it:

• It does not know what time your meeting is. The workbook says which week; only you know which evening. That is coming.
• It does not remind you. There are no notifications, and no syncing into Google or Apple Calendar.
• It does not track assignments — a talk or a part you have been given, with its own preparation and rehearsals.