Reflect on the past day

Purpose

This is the first step of daily planning. You will review where you spent your time the day before, what got done, and what didn't.

Use the reflection step to:

• Understand how much you worked and how you feel. Was this workload sustainable?
• Understand what channels you spent your time in. Did you spend time on the areas that are important to you?
• Appreciate everything you got done.
• Reflect on what you had planned to do but didn't get done.

Walkthrough

How to use

The daily reflection contains shows your past day in two ways:

• Breakdown of total time and time by channel
• Breakdown of tasks completed and those that you didn't get to

Take a moment to appreciate all your hard work and then hit "Next" to start planning your next day.

Time breakdown · 1:36

By default, you'll see where you spent your time across all contexts but you can click on "in total" to change which context's data is shown.

The graphs and charts show where you spent your time based on the actual time logged on each task in the finished list.

If you want to get an accurate picture of your time each day:

• Track actual time on each task. You can do this by running the timer while you are working or manually setting the actual time on the task.
• To get credit for time spent in meetings, make sure to import all your meetings to your task list during daily planning or by hovering over an event and clicking "Add to tasks".
• Tag all your tasks into channels.

If any of your tasks are missing time tracking information or a channel, you can still add those during this stage.

Completion breakdown · 3:17

In the main panel, you'll see your tasks in two columns. One for tasks with any "completion activity" on that day called "Finished today/yesterday", and one for tasks with no "completion activity" on the past workday called "Didn't get to".

If you forgot to check something off earlier in the day or yesterday, you can do that now.

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Checking off a task you completed yesterday

If you are planning for the current day, and you see tasks under "Didn't get to" that you forgot to check off yesterday, you can do that now. The tasks will then appear as completed in yesterday's column.

This is the one exception to the rule where, usually, checking off a task today completes the task and keeps it in today's column.

If you got pulled into something that wasn't part of your plan, go ahead and add it to "finished" column to track your time.

Reflecting on past days

If you want to review your reflection for a day in the past, you can do that by scrolling to that day in the Kanban and clicking "Reflect" from the top of the day's column.

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Completion activity

Tasks have "completion activity" on a particular day if the task or any of its subtasks were marked completed on that day or logged any amount of actual time on that day.

Best practices

• If you don't want to track your time, you can enable count planned time as actual in your settings to get a rough idea of where you spent your time. However, we strongly recommend tracking your time and can use Focus Mode to help you do that, so you get better at estimating your daily workload.
• If you want to reflect on your time or tasks in a single channel or context during daily planning, you can filter to a specific channel or context with the CMD+L keyboard shortcut. For example, if you want to only see your work-related tasks during daily planning, you can use the keyboard shortcut and select the #all channel in your work context, which will hide your personal tasks.
• If you are just starting out with Sunsama, don't be disheartened if your actual time spent working is a lot less than you are hoping for. Keep at your daily planning practice and over time, you'll get better at carving out time for deep focus!
• If you didn't finish everything you set out to, that's okay too! It can take a couple weeks to start understanding what an achievable workday looks like for you and how to plan it.