Daily Shutdown

Purpose

The daily shutdown ritual is designed to help you end your workday on time, celebrate and share your progress, and avoid burnout.

Walkthrough

How to use

Setting your daily shutdown time · 0:26

The daily shutdown pairs with daily planning where you'll be prompted each day to pick what time you want to shut down.

When that time rolls around, you'll see an in-app notification to shut down your day. This is your reminder to stop working at the time you intended to. Clicking on this will send you into the daily shutdown flow which consists of three steps:

Step 1: Review · 1:25

In the first step, you'll see your progress for the day: the tasks you completed and how much time you spent on them.

Step 2: Reflect and share progress · 1:42

In the next step, Sunsama gives you the opportunity to write a small reflection on your workday. Taking a couple minutes to write out what you did, what you learned, and where you struggled creates a sense of fulfillment. This is your chance to celebrate your workday, instead of stressing about all the things you need to do tomorrow.

Click "Post to Slack" if your team practice async daily standups, or Slack standups, and this reflection will be posted to the Slack channel of your choice.

Once you click "Wrap up". You'll move on to the "Done for the day" screen.

Step: 3: Walk away · 2:53

That's it! Your workday is over. You did it! Walk away from the computer and enjoy the rest of your day.

FAQ and common issues

Accessing daily shutdown on demand

If you finish early and/or want to trigger the shutdown flow on demand, you can use the keyboard shortcuts o or trigger the shutdown routine from the command palette.

If your chosen shutdown time is in the next two hours, you'll also see the "Shutdown" button appear as a suggested option at the top of today's task column.

Reviewing past reflections

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

Settings

You can disable your automated daily shutdown entirely from your account settings.

Best practices

• Use the "Done for day" screen as nudge to actually stop working and step away. That screen should be the last thing you see before you close your computer screen and walk away!
• If you work on a team that shares daily updates, you can click "Post to Slack" to share that directly to Slack. This is a great async alternative to standup meetings.
• Even if you don't use Slack with your team, you could consider posting these reflections to a private channel in Slack so they are all in one place for you to catalogue and reflect on.
• If you want Sunsama to auto-generate a list of tasks you completed for the reflection step, you can do that from the "Automate" button in the bottom of the screen.
• If you never want to write a reflection or share progress with teammates, you can click "Skip this step in the future" to dismiss it forever.