Study OS isn't a productivity app — it's an instrument panel for grad school. This guide walks you through the twelve things you need to know, with annotated visuals for every screen. Start at any step.
Every morning, open Study OS and tap SET FOCUS. Type the single most important task for the day — the one thing that, if you do it, the day was a win. This becomes your Anchor. It sits at the top of your dashboard all day so you can't forget.
Below the Anchor sits the Pomodoro. Tap START. Work for 25 minutes. The ring fills. A chime sounds. Take a 5-minute break. Repeat. The terminal-style readout shows what phase you're in and how much time is left.
25M focus, 45M deep work, 5M / 15M for breaks.A new syllabus, an email about a paper, a screenshot of an assignment list — all of it goes into Intake. Drop the file (PDF, image, text), and Study OS uses Claude to extract assignments, due dates, and readings. You confirm what gets added. No manual entry.
Scroll down on the dashboard to QUEUES. Three accordion cards: Today's Agenda, This Week, Anytime. Tap any card to expand. Each item shows the program (MDes / MPA / AI), title, and a colored urgency tag (overdue, due tomorrow, on track).
Five compact icon-rows tell you instantly whether you're on track: Pomodoros today, Readings done, Tasks pending, Weeks to term, Days to next deadline. The card background colors itself by urgency — pink means alert, green means good, neutral means on track. No charts to interpret. Just glance.
Sunday night: open Planner → tap Generate Week. Study OS reads your deadlines, your reading queue, your Pomodoro pattern from past weeks, and proposes a schedule. Tap ACCEPT to write it to the calendar. You can drag blocks to refine. Done in 3 minutes instead of 30.
Brain frozen? Ten things due, can't pick one? Tap OVERWHELM in Quick Tools. Six guided steps walk you out of the spiral: dump the cloud → name the heaviest → break it into the next 10 minutes → start. The interface goes minimal so nothing else competes for attention.
Friday afternoon, Study OS prompts a 5-minute review: wins, drops, next intention. Three text fields. What worked. What didn't. What you're carrying forward into Sunday's planning. The system uses your answers to tune next week's generated schedule.
When you drop a syllabus into Intake, Study OS doesn't parse it itself — it gives you a ready-made prompt to paste into Claude (claude.ai), Claude returns structured JSON, and you paste it back. This four-step round trip is the most powerful capture in the whole app, and it's the part most people don't understand. Here it is, frame by frame.
// Example of what Claude returns: { "assigns": [ { "title": "Essay — second essay", "due": "2026-05-10", "p": "mpa", // program: design | mpa | ai "priority": "high", // high | med | low "course": "PA-501" } ], "readings": [ { "title": "Norman ch.1-3", "due": "2026-05-03", "pages": 42 } ] }
School/StudyOS/intake/ — the study-intake skill does the round-trip for you, no manual copy-paste. The web flow above is for when you're on iPhone or away from Cowork.Your data lives in three places at once, and each one protects against a different kind of loss. Browser storage is fast but fragile. Vault JSON files are durable and portable. iCloud sync makes both cross-device. Here's the picture.
One-time setup, only on desktop Chrome/Edge. Settings → Connect Vault → pick the School/StudyOS/data/ folder. After that, every save writes to disk automatically. Browse to data/ in Finder to see your files. iCloud takes over from there.
School/StudyOS/data/ in your vault. Done.Settings → EXPORT NOW downloads a single studyos-backup-2026-04-27.json file. Save it anywhere — Drive, AirDrop, email to yourself.
Settings → IMPORT FROM FILE → pick the JSON. App rebuilds your data from scratch. Useful when switching devices or recovering from a wipe.
Every save snapshots the previous state (last 30 versions). Settings → Version History → tap a date → Restore. Like time travel for your data.
If it's been more than 7 days since your last manual export, the app shows a yellow nudge banner. Don't ignore it. Hit Export.
Every item carries three signals: program (red MDes / indigo MPA / green AI), status (todo / in-progress / done), and urgency (auto-calculated from due date). The list view always shows them. Filter chips at the top let you slice instantly.
A few small things that compound into hours saved over a 4-year program. Memorize these.
Hit ⌘K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Win) to open the command palette. Type to fuzzy-search any view, action, or item. Fastest navigation in the app.
Top-right square icon → flip light ↔ dark. Setting persists across devices via the same iCloud-synced settings file.
During a Pomodoro tap AMBIENT below the ring. Everything except your one thing fades. Tap EXIT top-right when done.
During a session, an idea pops into your head? Tap the floating + bottom-right. Type it, save. It goes to a buffer queue you process after the session.
D=dashboard · R=readings · A=assignments · W=writing · P=planner · F=flashcards · S=settings · ?=show all.
Tap the ring itself (anywhere inside the circle) to start or pause. No need to find the button.
In any list, long-press an item → Make this my focus. It becomes today's Anchor instantly.
Speaker icon next to SESSION 01 mutes Pomodoro chimes. Setting persists across sessions.