Shutdown and highlights

Wrap up your day with a daily shutdown and publish a summary of what you got done.

Shut down your day to review where your time went and publish your daily highlights, a summary of your work you can keep or share with your team.

Start a shutdown

Open a shutdown any of these ways:

  • Click Shutdown under “Daily rituals” in the left nav.
  • Press O.
  • Near the end of the day, click Shutdown in today’s column on the Board.

Once it’s past your shutdown time, the nav item shows a Start label until you shut down. A checkmark appears after you’ve shut down for the day.

First-time setup

The first time you open a shutdown, Sunsama walks you through a short setup:

  1. On the “Generate your daily highlights” screen, click Get started.
  2. Under “Where do you keep track of your work?”, turn on the tools you use. Sunsama drafts your highlights from what you did in them. Click Next.
  3. Under “Draft your first highlights”, pick a day and click Draft highlights. Sunsama opens your first draft.

The shutdown flow

  1. Review your day. The “Today in review” screen shows your total time, what you worked on and what you didn’t get to. Click Next.
  2. Publish your highlights. Sunsama drafts your highlights. Edit them, then click Done for the day.

Publishing completes your shutdown. Sunsama confirms with “Shutdown completed!”, stops focus mode and shows your end of day message.

Shutdown doesn’t move unfinished tasks. They roll over to the next day as usual.

Set your shutdown time

Your shutdown time is the end of your work day. To change it, go to Settings > Schedule and set each day’s end time under Default schedule. The default is 5:00 PM.

Shutdown settings

In Settings > Rituals:

  • Automated daily shutdown: shows a “Daily shutdown” reminder at the end of your day. You can snooze it for 30 minutes or dismiss it until tomorrow. It’s on by default.
  • End of day message: what you see when you’re done for the day. Choose “Daily encouragement”, “No message” or “Custom message”.
  • When do you want to receive the draft of your daily highlights?: the days and time Sunsama emails you a draft of your highlights. To stop the email, deselect every day.

Write your highlights

Daily highlights interface

Highlights

This section summarizes the noteworthy work from your day. Sunsama picks some highlights for you and writes an AI summary for each one. Keep the list focused, not exhaustive.

Hover over a highlight to:

  • Remove it from your highlights
  • Highlight it (star) for emphasis
  • Hide summary, Show summary or Resummarize
  • Edit title

Drag highlights to reorder or nest them. Click Add a highlight… to add one that isn’t in your activities. It creates a new Sunsama task.

To turn off AI summaries, go to Settings > AI and turn off Automatic summaries.

Other activities

While your highlights are a draft, Other activities lists everything Sunsama tracked that day: tasks, to-dos, items and emails. Only you can see it. To add an item to your highlights, hover over it and click Include, or drag it into your highlights.

Personal reflection

Pick an emoji for how the day went and write a reflection, starting from “Today was…”. To start each reflection from your own questions, open the settings (gear icon) and turn on Use prompts in the Prompts tab.

The right panel shows your time spent, weekly objectives and timeline for the day.

Publish and share

  1. Click Preview to see your highlights the way others will.
  2. Click Done for the day to publish. The first time, Sunsama asks where to share them.

Once published, the button reads Done. Click it to turn your highlights back into a draft.

To send a copy after publishing, click Share. You can email it, copy the text or copy a link.

Sharing destinations

Open the settings (gear icon) to choose where your highlights go:

  • Destinations: your highlights always post to Sunsama. Click Add destination to also email someone (“Email your manager, client, etc.”), post to Slack or post to Teams. Click Send a preview to yourself to check what they’ll receive.
  • Privacy: choose whether Teammates can view and Anyone with link can view, and hide time tracking, your timeline, weekly objective progress or private tasks.

Read highlights from your team

The Highlights item appears in the left nav once there’s something to read: your own highlights or drafts, or highlights your teammates share with the workspace. It opens a feed you can browse by date and filter by teammate. A badge counts teammates’ highlights you haven’t seen yet.

Open any highlights to react or comment.