Bringing your plan from a chatbot

A brand-new Yappie is empty, and typing a whole week into it is nobody's idea of a good evening. So Yappie can take a plan you build with the chatbot you already use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever — and set itself up from that.

Nothing is connected. Yappie has no link to any chatbot, no API key, no account to join up. You copy some words out of Yappie, you paste them in, and you paste the answer back. Both directions are you, which is also why nothing about your week leaves your computer unless you send it yourself.

The short version

1. Settings → Study plan & data → Prompts. Pick which one you want and copy it.
2. Paste it into your chatbot. It asks you a short batch of questions. Answer them.
3. Copy what it writes back and paste it into Yappie.
4. Read what it would change, fix anything you like, and press Import.

Getting the prompt

Open Settings → Study plan & data, then the Prompts tab. There are two, and you pick with the radio buttons:

• I want to plan from scratch with my chatbot — for a Yappie you have not set up yet.
• I want my chatbot to evaluate and revise my plan — for one you already use. Take your plan out first (below), and hand your chatbot both.

The prompt is shown in full, so you can read what you are about to send before you send it. You cannot edit it here — change it in your chatbot after you paste it, if you want to. Change it a long way and Yappie may not be able to read what comes back.

Pressing Copy prompt shows a short note first. It says: if you have a paid chatbot, use that one. We tested this prompt across several, and the stronger models follow it closely while the free and smaller ones skip parts of it more often. It works either way; you are just less likely to need a second go. Tick "don't show this again" and it stays gone on that computer.

Talking to your chatbot

Paste the prompt and send it. A good chatbot will come back with questions, not a plan — a single batch of mostly multiple-choice ones, covering what your projects are, what each of them is actually made of, how long a sitting takes and how often things come round.

That question about what a project is made of matters. A PhD is reading, analysis and writing, not one block called "PhD". The prompt asks your chatbot to guess two or three kinds of work and let you correct it, so you end up with tasks the size of a real morning instead of one enormous one.

Answer in your own words. You do not need to be thorough — the prompt tells your chatbot to prefer a sensible default over another question, and never to invent projects or routines you have not mentioned.

Then it writes one block of JSON. That is your plan.

Bringing it back

Open Settings → Study plan & data → Import and export.

Paste it. Copy the whole block out of the chat and paste it into the box, then press Check this plan. You do not need to save a file — Yappie takes the code fences and the message around them off for you.

Or open a file. If your chatbot gave you a .json file instead, use Choose a file underneath.

Either way Yappie reads it on your own computer. Nothing is uploaded.

Reading what it would change

This is the part worth slowing down for. Yappie shows you every project, tag and recurring task the plan would touch, in three tabs, and writes nothing until you press Import.

Each row carries a badge:

• New — you do not have this yet.
• Updated — you have it, and the plan changes something about it.
• Unchanged — you have it and the plan leaves it alone. Import the same file twice and everything reads Unchanged, because nothing is added a second time.
• Archived — the plan retires this one.

You can edit any of it before importing. Names and colours change in place; a recurring task opens the same editor as the Recurring tasks page, so you can fix its schedule, its steps, its times and its periods right there.

Delete on a row means leave this one out of the import. It never removes anything from Yappie. Take a project out and the recurring tasks in that plan which pointed at it go to your Default project instead; take a tag out and they simply do not get it. Whatever you already have stays exactly as it is, and you can put a row back until the moment you press Import.

If something in the plan is wrong, Yappie says so in plain sentences and blocks the import until it is fixed — and there is a Copy report button. Paste that back to the chatbot that wrote the plan and it can usually fix the lot in one go.

Press Import, and your new recurring tasks are waiting on Tomorrow.

Taking your plan out

The Import and export tab also exports. One button, one small file: your projects, your tags and your recurring tasks. It holds nothing about your focus time, your streaks or your history.

There is one opt-in box: include how the last 90 days actually went. Ticked, the file also carries a short summary — minutes focused per day, per project and per tag, and how often each recurring task came round against how often you actually did it. No task names beyond the recurring ones, and no record of individual sessions.

It is off by default, and it is worth understanding why it exists. A chatbot asked to revise your week while blind to how the last one went can only rearrange what you handed it. With the summary, it can say "this one is not working" — and in our own testing, that is exactly the difference it made. It also travels with the file, to whichever chatbot you paste it into, which is why you decide each time rather than once.

Revising a plan you already use

Export your plan, switch to the Prompts tab, choose evaluate and revise, and hand your chatbot both. Then bring the revision back the same way you brought the first one.

One thing to know: leaving something out of the file does not remove it. If you want a routine retired, your chatbot has to say so explicitly — the prompt tells it that, and the preview will show it as Archived so you see it coming.

What Yappie will not take

• One-off tasks. A plan holds only what repeats. Yappie fills Today and Tomorrow from your recurring tasks itself.
• Time off. Your days off are yours to declare in Yappie, not something a chatbot plans around.
• Your history. The 90-day summary goes out, never in. Yappie writes your history from what you actually do.

And a size rule worth knowing: one sitting stops at 90 minutes, but a task does not. A two-hour task is one task with steps that add up — 40, 40 and 40. If your chatbot writes a single 120-minute block, Yappie trims it to 90 and tells you, and the message says to ask for steps instead.