Since September 2026
Switchboard
Planning app
Pulls deadlines from syllabi into one ranked to-do list, and books work sessions straight onto Google Calendar.
- Deadlines and tasks tracked
- 90
- Courses imported from syllabi
- 4
- Versions shipped
- 24
01 The problem
The app started from conversations I had with other students at Northeastern. We all use a lot of tools to organize our work: Google Calendar, Canvas, Granola, AI tools, and paper and digital to-do lists.
All of these have useful features but they also have features that don’t work well for us as university students, and most importantly, the tools are all disconnected from each other.
02 How it works
Claude pulls every deadline out of an uploaded syllabus, ready to review and approve.
Open tasks are ranked by how soon they’re due, how urgent they are, and how much they’re worth.
Tapping a task, then a free slot, books a work session straight onto Google Calendar with a reminder. Anything else can be typed or dictated into one box, and Claude turns it into a task.
03 What I changed
The mistake
- The AI started guessing due dates. A “due before class” deadline was being treated as due at 11:59 PM, which would have made work late.
- Now it reads the real class time from the calendar, won’t approve anything without a due time, and asks instead of guessing.
The result
- 90 deadlines and tasks across 4 courses, 83 of them imported straight from syllabi.
- Even before I had rolled my organizational app out to other people for testing, other students were actively asking to use it.
The lesson
- Having an interesting idea is not enough to make people invested in a product or willing to use it.
- You need to identify the customer and the problem from the start and work backwards from there.
- Check early, and don’t let AI guess when it matters.