Speaker 0 (00:00:00) – Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I’m your host, Miranda Merton. Welcome to Tip Tuesday where I give you the skinny on an app or a tool that could be useful for your personal productivity. Today’s tip is Sunsama from their website, make work-life balance a reality. The Digital Daily Planner that helps you feel calm and stay focused for their pricing. It is $20 a month or $16 a month build annually When you choose the annual version, that comes out to about $192 per year, which is definitely pricier than most project management apps. And I will go through all of their features here for you today. Well, not all of them, because this would be a long, long list. All right, they have apps that are compatible for all devices and desktops.

Speaker 0 (00:01:01) – So let’s dive right in. So about their tagline, I don’t really believe in a complete work-life balance. I mean yes, we all want some version of it, but it’s so hard to do and I try to tote the line daily with work-life balance. The amount of times that I try to shut down my work at the end of the day only to be working on something at 9:30 PM is laughable. It happens all the time and I am constantly in a battle with myself trying to find a work-life balance, but it doesn’t stop me from trying and I’m always looking for new ways to keep me honest and on track when it comes to managing my time between my business and my clients and personal and family stuff. There’s a lot going on and I am sure that you have a lot going on too. And no matter how much I try to plan, it always somehow goes to s— anyway.

Speaker 0 (00:02:05) – And so that’s why I’m constantly, you know, looking for something new. Usually whatever I have planned usually starts to unraveled about like 11:15 AM seriously, like usually in the morning I’m on track, I’m thinking it’s gonna be a fantastic day, things are going my way and then give it a couple hours and someone or something is bound to torpedo those plans. And I realize that it’s not really the torpedo that um, is torpedoing my day and my plans. It’s usually what I tend to do when the torpedo comes at me. What I normally do is when the torpedo comes, before I would tackle it head on, someone throws something at me and I’m like, sure I can do that. I’ll go ahead and tackle it now cuz it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna take a long time, right? So I go ahead and do it and then it throws off the rest of the day.

Speaker 0 (00:03:02) – So I tackle it, I stop what I’m doing, I’m gonna handle it. Now that’s usually a never a great idea because that’s what throws off my entire schedule. And so after some soul searching to understand how I work, why I procrastinate, I realized that I just needed to move out of the way of the torpedo, let it crash where it was gonna crash and then handle it later. So in the midst of my search for doing different things, different ways, I came across Sunsama. Now before I get into Sunsama, I will caveat with this. If you do not like lists and structure and seeing your entire day, lay it out in front of you, then skip this one. It’s not for you. It’s probably just gonna bring you some overwhelm that you’re not ready for. And you have to know yourself. You have to know what works for you and what doesn’t.

Speaker 0 (00:03:55) – But I’m gonna talk out both sides of my mouth here and kind of contradict myself. If you tend to find yourself being overwhelmed and scattered a lot, it might actually help you so you can listen, see if it’s gonna um, be something that resonates with you and let’s get into it. So about Sunsama, I have been using it for a few weeks now and it has seriously helped my organization and my procrastination. It helps me see where I’m actually spending my time and I can evaluate what’s important and what can wait. And then it helps me be more focused overall. I know I’m really, really building this up here, but stay with me. So if you decide to give, since I’m a try, they actually have great onboarding articles, which I definitely recommend. I watched all of the videos and that’s how I was able to get up and running really quickly.

Speaker 0 (00:04:49) – So if you wanna try to poke around yourself, you might miss some of the features that aren’t as obvious. Um, so I’m gonna do a quick rundown of the features. It currently integrates with 10 other apps to help you plan your day. That includes Gmail, outlook Notion, JIRA, um, click up, Asana, Trello, GitHub, Todoist and Slack. And of course, um, Google Calendar. So you get guided daily planning, you start your day with a planning ritual or do it at the end of the day to plan for tomorrow if you prefer. Now, initially when I started, I did it at the end of the day because that’s what I was used to doing. But as I used the app, I found that the start of the day actually ended up working better for me. So it walks you through a few steps to prompt you of what to plan and what’s important and then it helps you pull your tasks from your other app.

Speaker 0 (00:05:49) – So if you have Asana or click up, you can actually pull those into your to-do list, which is gold. And actually this is the reason why I ended up stumbling upon Sunsama because I use Asana with about three different clients and it was just annoying having to switch workspaces to go client to client and whatever and try to figure out what was more important in what needed to be scheduled. So I, when I found this and I found that I could integrate them all together and think about it, if you have clients on Asana or clients on click up and then you have clients that send you things through email, which I also have some clients that email me, it’s kind of a mess. , you have to jump around throughout your day or you know, figure out what to do and what task is more important or pressing.

Speaker 0 (00:06:42) – And so I wanted to find a way to integrate that and integrate them all. You would think that Asana would have a way that everything could just be on one homepage for you and pull in everything from all of your workspaces, but they don’t. So I find that super annoying and Sunsama actually, you know, solved that problem for me. Um, the next thing they do is they give you daily time goals. So you can add times to each of your tasks and there’s a timer on each task as well. So you can see the actual time that it took to complete it. Now this one has been really great for me and I did not think that I would use it or need it because I hate tracking time, but it has helped me realize that my estimates are actually crap. And that part of my problem when it comes to planning my day is that I tend to overcommit because I think it takes a lot less time to do things than it does.

Speaker 0 (00:07:38) – So I’ll say something, I’ll look at it and say, oh, that’ll take me 20 minutes or 30 minutes and it ends up taking me 45 minutes or an hour. And now looking at those, especially if they’re repeatable tasks, which you can add repeatable tasks to this, you can adjust your time estimates, which is genius. Like I, yeah, looking, I’m gonna be honest with you, I am really bad at estimating my time and I’ve found that since I’ve been using this, um, and stacking everything on top of each other, it’s really given me the ability to see when I’m over-committed and what days I’m over-committed. Um, they give you the option to create a, basically a work schedule like a workday. I’m gonna work from 10 to five or whatever. You can do the same for each day or you can just switch those up. Mine are different, like I put actual work time on Fridays from 11 to two.

Speaker 0 (00:08:34) – Mondays might be nine to six. Um, so you can change those out for each day. And then depending on what to dos or tasks that you pull in for that day, they actually add up the time for you and you can see how committed you are. Like if I’m looking at my Monday, uh, right now, the upcoming Monday I have, uh, it’s showing me that I have seven hours committed and the time at the top will change colors and it’s saying I’m over committed right now. So I might want to retake another look at that and um, see what can wait and what I need to adjust. So I love the daily time goals. I didn’t think I would use it and I didn’t think it would be um, that important, but hey, this is why you, you test things out and you figure out what’s gonna work for you.

Speaker 0 (00:09:26) – Um, along those lines you can do task ordering or calendar time boxing, which means you can either just order the tasks in the order you’d like to do it. And when I say order, let me clarify, it is set up like a can band board. So if you’re used to like Trello, um, that’s what your task will look like. It looks like a can band board for the week. And um, it basically you can order your tasks under the days. So the top will be your days of the week and then your tasks are in cards like a Trello board. Um, so you can either order them in the order you’d like to complete them or you can actually schedule the time, like a time blocker onto your calendar and um, it will, you can add times for everything. Now I find that super extra and overwhelming and I did it for like a day or two and I really realized I didn’t really need to do the calendar time blocking thing.

Speaker 0 (00:10:27) – I just order the tasks in the way I want to do them. And that way I don’t have to put a specific time on everything because I find when I put a time on everything, it never goes that way anyways. So, and sometimes if I am, let’s say I have to leave the house in 30 minutes and I’ve got something scheduled, um, I can just pick the next thing that’s only gonna take me five or 10 minutes and bang out a couple of those. Um, so I really just keep ’em in the order that I wanna do them and then hopefully I’ll stay on track that way. Um, also they do have like a, uh, when you click the timer you can put it in focus mode so you know exactly what you’re supposed to be working on. Um, so if you are prone to procrastination and putting things off, that might also be a feature that is of interest to you.

Speaker 0 (00:11:19) – Another feature that I love is that you can check emails from within the app so you can merge all of your emails. And I have, I take all of my client emails. Um, so I have [email protected], I have about four of those emails, so I just synced all of them plus my own [email protected] email plus my personal email. I sync them all into the app and then I can check them all from the app, which has been a game changer for me because I have a task now that says process emails and I just process all the emails one time at nine o’clock and then throughout the day of course I can see and I can check in and see if I’ve gotten anything else. But having that new process, emails all at once, task, it only takes me less than 20 minutes.

Speaker 0 (00:12:13) – It takes me 20 minutes or less depending on how many emails I have and I can do all of those all at once. Again, something I didn’t think I would need, but now it’s one of my favorite features. And they say it’s not meant for you to process all of your emails that way in the, in the app, but it’s possible. So I do it and I like doing it that way. There are a few other features that they do have that I find valuable, but I’m going to have to cut this one short cuz you know, I like to keep my tip. Tuesdays nice and short for you and this one’s getting a little long, but I love Sunsama. So far I’m obsessed with tracking my to-do list and my tasks, which I didn’t think was something that I liked. What I’ll do is I will do a more in-depth episode about specifically how I work it into my day and my weekly, cuz I do have weekly planning and daily planning as well and how I actually plan with it.

Speaker 0 (00:13:13) – So check out the link below to see if it’s right for you, see if it’s something you’re interested in, and let me know if any of these features stand out for you as a potential favorite or something that you think that you wouldn’t ever use. Like me, there was a couple features, I was like, I’m not gonna use that and I ended up using them all the time. So reach out to me, I’m at Miranda, me on Instagram or you can send me an email. Uh, that is all I have for today. I will see you next time. Thanks for listening to Coffee Powered Systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the show notes or on the [email protected]. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with another bestie who would love it too. And join me here next time.