Daily Kanban

Purpose

In Sunsama, tasks are always viewed in the context of the day you want to work on them. Each day, has its own column, in which you can see the tasks and meetings you want to do that day.

When these task columns are placed side by side, we refer to it as a "Kanban" or "Daily Kanban".

In this guide, we will explain how task columns are laid out, how the daily kanban works, as well as some special behaviors like task rollover and completion credits.

Walkthrough

How to use

The constituent component of the "Daily Kanban" is a single daily task column. You will see these columns in a variety of places in the app e.g. Workspace View, Today View, Daily Planning, etc.

Column layout

A single task column has a date header, a new task creation button, and then a list of tasks that are associated with that day.

Differences between past, present, and future · 0:57

The daily task column behaves slightly differently depending on whether the day is in the past, future, or is today's column. We'll note some of these differences as we go.

Navigation header · 1:15

From the navigation header you can:

• Lock the that day into view by clicking on the header
• Access the Reflect or Plan rituals
• See the number of remaining tasks (if it's todays column)
• Add a new task to the day

Workload counter · 2:02

Each task column shows a workload counter. For days in the past, it shows how much time was spent on the tasks in view. For today and days in the future it shows how much allocated work remains.

Task ordering

Understanding how tasks are ordered in a column · 2:35

• Newly created tasks show at the top
• Incomplete tasks show next, you can pick whether you want tasks that rolled over from the day before to roll towards the top or bottom of this section from your account settings.
• Completed tasks show in the bottom section, with the most recently completed tasks towards the top.
• If a task has a set start time, Sunsama will try to auto-sort the task to the most sensible place in your list.
• Past columns do not support ordering. Task ordering is determined by when the task was completed during the day.

Reordering tasks

The easiest way to re-order tasks is to drag and drop a task in the list. If your list is long, you can right click on the task to pull up the context menu which allows you "Move to top" and "Move to Bottom".

Understanding what shows in each column

In general, the the tasks you see on each day are either the tasks that were completed that day (for the days in the past), tasks that are planned for that day (for future days), or a combination of both, if the column in question is today.

The one exception is when you get "completion credit" for making partial progress towards the completion of a task.

Completion Credits · 4:43

If you make some progress on a task on a given day but don't finish it that day, you'll see "completion credit" in your task column. This will show as a faded out task with no main checkbox.

You can get completion credit for a task if:

• You check off a subtask that day
• You track actual time on the task (or any of it's subtasks) for that day

Navigating between columns

Moving tasks between days · 5:52

There are two ways to move tasks between days:

• Dragging and dropping them
• Using the "Start date" menu that appears on any task

Special cases:

• Checking off a task in the past will cause it to appear on today's column. There's no such thing as an incomplete task in the past.
• Checking off a task in the future will cause it to appear as completed on today's column. There's no such thing as a task completed in the future.

Task Rollover

At midnight, any uncompleted task will roll over to the next day.

Tasks that take multiple days to complete

If, at the end of your work day, you have worked on but not completed a task, you can simply leave it un-checked and it will appear in your task list tomorrow for you to continue working on. Alternatively, you can pro-actively drag the task to tomorrow's column.

If you had logged actual time and/or completed a subtask on the task before doing so, evidence of the task will still show on the previous day as a record of work you did on that task.

If you are regularly working on tasks across multiple days, consider these techniques to better manage those types of tasks.

Tasks you forgot to complete yesterday

If you want to want to have a task show as complete in yesterday's column, you can:

• Drag the task into yesterday's column
• Click on the calendar icon on the task and select yesterday's date
• During Daily Planning, complete the task as it shows in "Didn't get to"

Kanban vs Task Details

If a task has logged actual time on multiple days, it will appear in those multiple columns. These are not separate tasks, but the one single task showing in multiple places. Deleting one instance of the task will delete the entire task.

In the Kanban View and Focus Mode, you see the timing information for the relative day only. If you've been working on the task for multiple days, you won't see the cumulative time for the task.

In the task page view, you'll see the cumulative time information for the task, across all days. You can click on the "actual time" to see the breakdown by day.