Add tasks to your day

Purpose

This is the second step in daily planning. You will add all the work you want to get done to your list for the day. This can include Sunsama tasks, tasks from your integrated tools, weekly objectives, emails and meetings.

Walkthrough

How to use

Each step of the guided planning flow contains recommendations and best practices in the left hand panel. If you ever get lost in this process, please refer to those recommendations.

Fill in calendar events · 0:58

In the left hand column, you'll see a callout to "Fill in your calendar events". Clicking the green button will automatically import your relevant events (per your import rules) for the day into your task list.

We highly recommend importing your daily meetings during planning. This gives you a complete picture of your daily workload and ensures your data in the daily reflection are complete.

Review the guide on Importing Events to understand how to configure the suggestions.

Roll today's tasks forward? (Evening Planning Only)

If you are planning out the next day, i.e. you are an evening planner, you'll be asked if you want to "roll today's tasks forward". If you click this, all your incomplete tasks will roll forward to tomorrow so that you can include them in your plan for tomorrow.

If you want to incorporate today's incomplete tasks into your plan for tomorrow, you'll want to roll tasks forward manually now, since tasks don't roll forward automatically until midnight.

Pull in tasks · 2:18

• Review your weekly objectives and pull in any that you want to work on today.
• Review your archive and backlog and pull in any tasks you want to do today.
• Browse any of your integrations and then drag and drop those tasks into today's column.
• You can create new Sunsama tasks by clicking the "Add a task" button at the top of the column.

Set time estimates and channels · 3:18

Now is a good time to make sure each task has a time estimate and a channel. The easiest way to do this is to hover of your first task (or during task creation), use the keyboard shortcut ~ to set a time estimate, use the keyboard shortcut # to set a channel, then use the ↓ to move down to the next task and repeat the process.

Hit Next

In the next step, you'll start to make sure your workload is reasonable.

Best practices

• Set a time estimate on every task, even if it's not a perfect estimate.
• Browse through your inbox and pull in emails that require significant work to complete or respond to. Part of planning a realistic workday means accepting that even simple tasks like responding to an email can take 15+ minutes.