Sunsama Daily Planning — The Focus Method That Merges Your To-Dos with Your Calendar
Sunsama's core method is to "drag" your to-do items and calendar time slots onto the same screen every morning, forcing you to assign an actual amount of time t
Sunsama's core method is to "drag" your to-do items and calendar time slots onto the same screen every morning, forcing you to assign an actual amount of time to each task, so that your daily plan turns from "a string of lists" into "a time budget." This act of placing tasks onto a timeline is precisely the biggest difference between Sunsama and pure list tools like Todoist or Notion—it forces you to confront the reality that a day has only 24 hours, rather than endlessly stuffing your list. What Problem Does Sunsama Actually Solve Most productivity anxiety comes from the gap between "an infinite task list and finite time." Traditional to-do lists let you keep adding items but never tell you whether you can actually finish everything today. Sunsama, founded by Ashutosh Priyadarshy in 2018, was designed from the outset to fight this "list bloat": it requires you to perform a deliberate "Daily Planning" ritual each morning, selecting from tasks imported from everywhere only the few things you truly need to do today , and tagging each with an estimated time. When you schedule three tasks estimated at 90 minutes each into a day with only 4 hours of open space left, the screen will immediately show that you are overloaded. This "visual overflow" is friction Sunsama deliberately creates, with the goal of making you weigh trade-offs before you start working, rather than discovering at 5 p.m. that your plan was unrealistic. It integrates sources like Google Calendar, Outlook, Todoist, Asana, Trello, Jira, Gmail, and Slack, consolidating tasks scattered across different tools into a single daily view, then letting you drag them into calendar time slots (time blocking). Why "Tasks × Calendar" Integration Improves Focus Scheduling tasks into concrete time slots reduces the cognitive cost of "deciding what to do next," and this cost is higher than most people assume. Research by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at UC Irvine, indicates that after being interrupted, people n
FAQ
What Problem Does Sunsama Actually Solve
Most productivity anxiety comes from the gap between "an infinite task list and finite time." Traditional to-do lists let you keep adding items but never tell you whether you can actually finish everything today. Sunsama, founded by Ashutosh Priyadarshy in 2018, was designed from the outset to fight this "list bloat": it requires you to perform a deliberate "Daily Planning" ritual each morning, selecting from tasks imported from everywhere only the few things you truly need to do today , and tag
Why "Tasks × Calendar" Integration Improves Focus
Scheduling tasks into concrete time slots reduces the cognitive cost of "deciding what to do next," and this cost is higher than most people assume. Research by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at UC Irvine, indicates that after being interrupted, people need on average about 23 minutes to return to a focused state on their original task ( "It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task after an interruption" (Source: UC Irvine, Gloria Mark, CHI 2008) ). Whe
Who Sunsama Is and Isn't For
Sunsama is best suited for knowledge workers whose calendars are chopped up by meetings and who also need to protect deep-work time—such as engineers, designers, consultants, and solo entrepreneurs. Its daily ritual is most valuable for people whose "work and tasks are scattered across multiple tools"—if your tasks are simultaneously lying in Slack, Gmail, Jira, and on sticky notes, consolidation alone can reduce things falling through the cracks. It is not suitable for three kinds of people: fi
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