Slack Integration

Connect Slack to Sunsama to create tasks from messages, post daily plans, and manage focus status.

The Slack integration in Sunsama lets you create tasks from Slack messages, post your daily planning and shutdown notes to Slack, and automatically update your Slack status when focused.

Installation and account management

Sunsama’s integration for Slack behaves a little differently than the others. You will not find Slack in the right hand panel of your Sunsama workspace along with the other integrations.

To set up the Slack integration, navigate to Integration settings from the main dropdown menu in the top left corner, then click “Add” next to Slack.

This action directs you to a connection page for your Slack workspace authorization. If not already authenticated with Slack, you may need to log in first, then click “Allow” to grant access.

Your Slack workspace is now connected, and the Sunsama bot is now added to your Slack workspace.

You can now use the integration for Slack to create tasks from Slack messages and post your daily planning and shutdown notes to Slack.

Posting to Slack

Post your daily plan, your shutdown reflection, and other ritual summaries to Slack from Sunsama.

How to use

On the last stage of any of the four ritual flows (daily planning, daily shutdown, weekly planning, and weekly review), you can post your reflection/plan to a Slack channel of your choosing.

Customize

The text on this screen is rich text that can be edited. Whatever is written on this page will be posted when clicking “Post to Slack”.

You can remove, edit, or add to any of the text on this page. Edit this text to make this Slack post more useful to you and your teammates who will see it.

Click the “Customize” or “Automate” button to control what is included by default on your Share your Plan page. Click “Apply” to save those settings, and “Refresh” to update your text.

Selecting your Slack channel

Click on # channel to select which of your Slack channels your plan is posted to.

Post to Slack

After selecting your channel, click “Post to Slack” to share your plan/reflection to Slack. Once you do so, the button will turn green.

Note: posting to Slack does not complete the ritual flow (i.e. complete your planning). Be sure to click the adjacent button (“Get Started”, “Wrap up”, “Done”) to complete the ritual.

Skip this step

If you click “Skip this step in the future”, you will not see this page and stage of any ritual flow going forward.

If you’ve done so and wish to see this step again, go to your Settings > Rituals and turn on the “Daily journaling” setting.

Best practices

The main purpose of posting to Slack is to inform your team/colleagues of your plan each day and then, at the end of the day, how your day actually went. This way you can keep your team in the loop on your progress and projects without needing to have regular standup meetings.

If sharing with your team, make sure the post is useful and appropriate. Answer questions such as: Is anything blocking my work? What’s my top priority? What got done today? What did I learn? How am I feeling? What do my colleagues need to know? Share links to any work you did e.g. demo videos, documents, code, etc.

If you are not on a team where this is useful for that purpose, you could instead consider posting to a private channel that serves as a personal diary or journal of your plans and reflections.

Converting messages to tasks

Sunsama’s integration for Slack lets you convert messages you received into tasks you can follow up on later.

How to use

The easiest way to turn a message from Slack into a task in Sunsama is to click on the ”…” menu that appears next to any message in Slack and then click “Create a task”.

Then you’ll be prompted to set a channel, a start date, and update any relevant details like the title or notes.

Best practices

Turn messages that will take several minutes to respond to into tasks and plan them out in your day so you don’t feel overwhelmed by substantial requests in Slack.

Update Slack when focused in Sunsama

How it works

When you start a task timer Sunsama can automatically update your status in Slack to let your colleagues know you are focused, what you are focused on, as well as snooze notifications so you don’t get pulled off track.

Turn on “Reduce Slack distractions when working”

Navigate to your Slack settings in Sunsama and turn on the toggle for “Reduce Slack distractions when working”.

Choosing your settings

Once you’ve enabled this feature, you can pick how you want it to work:

Update status: Control whether or not Sunsama updates your “Status” in Slack when you are running a timer. Your status will be unset whenever you stop the timer. If you turn this on, Sunsama will show your Status in Slack like this: Focused: TASK TITLE (via Sunsama)
Pause notifications: Control whether or not Sunsama should pause notifications when your timer is running. Pause notifications will be turned off when you stop your timer or at the end of the day, whichever comes first.
Show task details in status: Control exactly what details your colleagues will see in Slack.
- Always: If you select this option, the title of the task you are working on in Sunsama will always be shown as part of your Slack status e.g. Focused: TASK TITLE (via Sunsama)
- Use channel privacy: If you select this option, Sunsama will only show the title of tasks based on the privacy of the channel the task is in. Tasks in private channels or contexts or in a personal context will never show their title, instead you’ll simply see a message that says Focused (via Sunsama)
- Never: If you select this option, Sunsama will never show any details of your current task and it will always show Focused (via Sunsama)
Slack status emoji: Pick which emoji should show as your status in Slack.

Troubleshooting and FAQ

How can I create tasks from Slack?

There are two ways to create tasks from Slack:

Mentioning the sunsama bot (make sure to invite the bot to the channel first)
Using a Slack “Action” to turn a pre-existing message into a task.

Clicking the ”…” menu on any message reveals the option to turn a Sunsama message into a task.

Connecting private Slack channels

If you want to post to a private Slack channel, you need to first grant Sunsama access to the private Slack channel. Here’s how:

Inside of Slack, invite the @sunsama bot to the private channel
Go back to Sunsama, refresh the page or the app (CMD+R)
When selecting a channel to post to, you should now see private Slack channels

Connecting the correct Slack workspace

If you’ve accidentally connected the wrong Slack workspace, here’s how to fix it:

From your workspace settings, remove the integration for Slack
Re-add the integration for Slack
When prompted to authorize Slack use the select menu in the top right corner to select the correct Slack workspace