Daily Planning

Purpose

Guided daily planning is designed to help you create a calm, focused, and achievable plan for your upcoming workday.

Walkthrough

How to use

Entering Daily Planning · 1:01

You can enter the Daily Planning ritual manually or automatically.

To manually enter the Daily Planning flow, use keyboard shortcut P or click on "Daily Planning" in the left hand navigation menu.

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Daily planning multiple times

You may enter and complete the daily planning flow multiple times. This can be useful to plan just your work tasks, then your personal tasks. Or if your day radically changes, and you want to re-plan your day.

To be entered into daily planning automatically, go to Settings > Rituals. Enable "automated daily planning". Select a time you wish to be automatically entered into planning in the "When do you plan your day" setting.

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Evening daily planning

Set a "when do you plan your day" time of anything after 3:00 PM to be in "Evening Daily Planning" mode, where you plan for tomorrow automatically.

Reflecting on the past day · 1:30

If you did not complete the Daily Shutdown flow the previous day, the first stage of the flow you see may be a review of yesterday.

In this stage, you can review and edit what you completed yesterday, and even check off tasks you "didn't get to" that you forgot to mark complete in Sunsama.

Add tasks to your day · 3:02

This first proper stage of planning instructs you to build out your task list.

You may see a prompt to import certain calendar events into your task list. You can also configure your settings to automatically import calendar events for you. Refer to this guide for more information.

You may also add more tasks to your task list from your integrated tools, your backlog, your weekly objectives, or just new Sunsama tasks via the add task modal.

Predicted workload · 6:18

This stage of daily planning looks at your workload for the day, and warns you if you are overcommitted. Sunsama shows the sum of the planned times for all your work related tasks. If this is more than the workload threshold you've indicated in your settings, you'll see a warning.

You will also see a simple timeline showing when you may be able to complete all of your planned work, in comparison to your preferred shutdown time. Click on your shutdown time to change it.

If you are overcommitted, you may defer or snooze tasks to future days. You can do this by dragging them into the "Tomorrow" and "Next Week" columns, or by using the calendar date picker on any task you wish to move. You can also snooze them to tomorrow with keyboard shortcut D, or move a task to the backlog with keyboard shortcut Z.

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Accurate workload

This step of planning only works well if you've imported your meetings as tasks and added planned times to most of your tasks.

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Planning a realistic workload

When you first start using Sunsama, aim for a planned time significantly lower than the hours you'll be "at work". For example, if you are working from 9 AM - 5 PM, with a lunch break, a good workload to aim for would be 5.5 hours. As you use the product more, your ability to focus and estimate tasks will improve.

Finalize your plan · 10:05

Finally, arrange your tasks in the order you wish to work on them. This may optionally include timeboxing some or all of your tasks to the calendar.

You also have an opportunity to modify your shutdown time for the day, and optionally may add that to the calendar to create a calendar event for your Sunsama Shutdown.

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Controlling privacy, clutter, and availability

You can control which of your calendar's tasks get scheduled to when you drag and drop them to the calendar, the privacy level of the created events, or their availability (free/busy setting). For a breakdown of timeboxing related settings, go here: https://help.sunsama.com/docs/timeboxing-customizing-your-settings

If you don't want colleagues who can see your calendar to see what you are working on you can change the default privacy.

If you don't want working sessions for tasks to impact your availability, you can change the default availability.

If you don't want your primary calendar view cluttered with working sessions or don't want colleagues' calendars covered in "Busy" blocks, you can change the "Default calendar when scheduling tasks" to a different calendar that you own, link your channels with calendars, or create a new calendar just for Sunsama working sessions.

Share your plan · 11:45

Use this stage to review your plan for the day, jot down any potential obstacles you may face, and share your plan with your teammates.

You can edit the text that displays here, so feel free to modify the text of any tasks, or jot down extra notes.

Customize how your list of tasks displays (e.g. to include or exclude subtasks, channels, etc), by clicking the "Customize" button at the bottom of the screen.

Select which Slack or Microsoft Teams channel you'd like to post your plan to, and click "Post to Slack/Teams" to send it there.

At last, click "Get Started" to complete the daily planning ritual and begin your workday.

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Viewing previous Daily Planning reflections

If you want to see your plan from a past day, scroll back in your Kanban to the day in question and click on the "Daily planning" task. You will find the plan embedded in the notes section of the task.

Best practices

• Set your "when do you plan your day" setting to early morning, so you'll automatically enter daily planning upon opening Sunsama each morning.
• Enter the planning flow multiple times and use channel filtering (keyboard shortcut Shift F) to filter and plan just your work related tasks, and then your personal tasks for the day.
• Enter the planning flow and use the date picker to pick any future day to plan. This can help to have more awareness of your plan on future days.