Timeboxing

Schedule tasks onto your calendar to decide exactly what to work on and when.

Timeboxing means putting a task on your calendar at the time you’ll work on it. When you timebox a task, Sunsama creates a calendar event for it called a working session. It’s most useful when your day has meetings and other fixed commitments, because you can see exactly where the work fits.

If your day is mostly flexible, you can skip timeboxing and let Sunsama project your task list onto the calendar instead.

How to timebox a task

  • Drag and drop the task from your task list, or an item from an integration in the right hand panel, onto the calendar at the time you want.
  • Auto-schedule it: hover over the task and press X, or right-click it and choose Add to calendar. Sunsama picks the time. See Auto-scheduling and rescheduling.
  • Pin a projection: hover a dotted block on the calendar and click Pin to calendar to turn it into a working session.

The working session is as long as the task’s remaining planned time. If the task has no planned time, it uses your default duration, 30 minutes unless you’ve changed it.

You can only timebox your own tasks, and not tasks that came from a calendar event. Press Cmd + Z (Ctrl + Z on Windows) to undo.

To choose which calendar the working session goes on, see Calendars for timeboxing.

Add more working sessions

A task can have more than one working session, on the same day or on different days.

  1. Click the colored time in the top left corner of the task. A small calendar pops out.
  2. Click the calendar to add a working session, or drag an existing one to adjust it.
  3. Use the arrows at the top of the popout to move to other days.

Working session popout

When a task has working sessions on several days, it appears on each of those days. All of them are the same task, so deleting it on one day deletes the whole task.

Change a working session

  • Move or resize it by dragging the event or its edges on the calendar. Moves snap to 5 minutes.
  • Change the planned time the same way. While a task has working sessions, its planned time is the total length of those sessions. You can also click “planned” on the task to resize them in the popout.

On the Board and in focus mode, a task shows its planned and actual time for that day. Open the task to see the totals across every day. See Planned and actual times.

When a timeboxed task changes day or is completed

  • Moved to a later day: working sessions that haven’t happened yet are removed, since your schedule is different each day. Schedule it again on the new day. Sessions that already happened stay.
  • Moved to the backlog: its upcoming working sessions are removed.
  • Moved to an earlier day: working sessions after that day are removed. Moving a task to a past day marks it complete.
  • Completed early: if Auto-reschedule when a task is completed ahead of schedule is on (it is by default), the working session ends when you complete the task. A task scheduled 1 PM to 2 PM and completed at 1:30 PM becomes 1 PM to 1:30 PM. Completed before it starts, the session is removed. This applies to working sessions only, not to imported meetings.

Remove a working session

The task stays on your list. There are four ways:

  • Hover the working session and click the trash icon, Remove from calendar.
  • Open the working session and click Unpin from calendar.
  • Right-click the task and choose Clear from calendar. This removes all of that day’s working sessions for the task.
  • Hover the task and press Cmd + X (Ctrl + X on Windows), Remove task from calendar.

Deleting tasks, working sessions and meetings

  • Delete a timeboxed task: its working sessions disappear from the calendar too.
  • Delete a task created from a meeting: the event stays on your calendar.
  • Delete the meeting on your calendar: the task created from it is deleted too.