You kept notes before this app — a Notes app full of fragments, a spreadsheet, a paper journal in your gym bag. Here’s how to get years of them imported in an afternoon. We tested every step of this on our own notes, typed and handwritten, using both Claude and ChatGPT.
The short version
Download the CSV template from your Profile, hand it to an AI assistant along with your notes, and ask it to fill the template. Import the result. The app previews everything before a single session is written.
The prompt
Copy this, attach the template and your notes (paste the text, or export from your notes app as a PDF — both work):
I'm importing my old training notes into BJJ Journal. Attached: the app's CSV import template and my raw notes. Fill the template — one row per session — following the format the headers and example row demonstrate, then delete the example row. Rules: use only what's in my notes, and leave a cell blank rather than guessing — never invent instructors, partners, hours, or dates. Keep my full note text in my own words; fix typos but don't rewrite. Leave the tags column blank. If the same person's name appears in variant forms, normalize to one consistent spelling. Reflow line breaks that come from page layout; keep real paragraph breaks. Give me the result as a downloadable .csv file, and list everything you were unsure about instead of deciding silently.
Why those rules are in there
Tags blank: we let one AI tag freely and it proposed 89 new tags from a single import. Every one becomes a category in your journal. Tag as you revisit — you’ll do it better.
Normalize names: one of our raw notes read “Professor Sleepy” — a nickname, not a person. The AI dutifully made him an instructor. Without normalization, “Marta” and “Marta Quinn” become two coaches. (If some slip through anyway — see the cleanup step below.)
Blank over guessing: an invented value looks exactly like a real one forever. A blank is honest, and you can fill it later.
Handwritten journals
This works too — we turned ten phone photos of handwritten pages into four clean sessions. Two extra rules for the prompt: “Transcribe only what you can actually read; write [?] for any illegible word and list every [?] with its date” — and then check every date against the original page before importing. In our test, two AIs read the same handwritten date differently, and a wrong date imports cleanly and sits on the wrong day forever. It’s the one error nothing downstream catches.
Bonus move: after importing, open each session and attach the photo of that journal page. Your original handwriting — drawings included — lives with its transcription.
The preview is the gate
Nothing writes until you confirm. Read the preview like a customs officer: does the session count match? Are the instructors it’s about to create actually people? Is the tag list sane? If anything’s off, fix the CSV and re-upload — the import is all-or-nothing, so there’s no half-finished state to untangle.
The cleanup lap
However careful the AI was, your source notes probably spell some names two ways — ours did. After importing, open Manage → Instructors (or Training Partners), find the duplicates, and merge them. Every session moves to the surviving name, and each keeps the belt recorded at the time — nothing is rewritten.
That’s it. Years of notes, one afternoon, and the mat remembers everything.