Sunsama Review 2023: Is it the best daily planner?
Feeling scattered is normal when juggling work, family, health, and more. Without structure, days blur by in a frenzy of doing without direction.
The problem is a lack of intentional planning. We take on too many tasks across too many apps, losing sight of what matters.
Sunsama promises to bring order amidst the chaos. But is it worth the price tag?
I’ve tested Sunsama extensively. In this complete 2023 review, I’ll share how it transformed my fragmented days into focused, fulfilling ones. Sunsama has significantly improved my productivity, ultimately leaving me feeling accomplished at the end of the day!
Discover how to find sanity amidst daily hustle. Join me in exploring this game-changing productivity app!
TL;DR: Is Sunsama worth it?
Mindful Planning: Sunsama promotes thoughtful planning, urging a deeper connection with your daily tasks.
Centralized Workspace: Merge your scattered tasks under one roof, bidding farewell to app-hopping chaos.
Reflection for Self-Awareness: It’s more than just ticking off tasks; Sunsama nudges you to reflect, fostering self-awareness.
Realistic Scheduling: No more overstuffing your day; Sunsama encourages a realistic, achievable schedule.
Is Sunsama worth it? Absolutely, if you’re seeking a mindful, organized, and insightful approach to steering your daily ship amidst turbulent waters.
Dive into the full review to explore how Sunsama could be the lighthouse in your storm of tasks.
Sunsama Review: Pros and Cons Snapshot
Sunsama offers a neat layout for those in need of task management prowess. As a productivity tool, it’s become my go-to for orchestrating the daily hustle, despite a few hitches.
Here is a quick snapshot of the pros and cons based on my experience of using Sunsama daily.
Thumbs Up
Provides an intuitive, user-friendly interface that’s clean and simple to navigate
Transforms daily planning into a habit that lasts
Hones your time management skills, giving your entire planning process a shiny new edge
Boosts productivity by enabling you to set, track and accomplish realistic goals
Promotes work-life balance by tracking your workload and time
Helps you to maintain focus mode
Integrates smoothly with other popular project management, task management tools and planner apps
Offers helpful user manuals plus responsive customer service
Thumbs Down
High subscription costs without the Freemium option
Not ideal for large team collaboration and big projects
The iOS and Android apps feel condensed and less user-friendly than desktop
No integration with Apple Calendar
Who Should Use Sunsama Planner?
Perfect for Beginner Planners
If you’re new to daily planning and just starting to build the habit, you’ll love this productivity app.
Sunsama uses a daily guided planning ritual that walks you through the entire planning process, helping you organize and schedule your task list. This makes it easy for beginners to plan and stick with it.
Ideal for Busy Professionals
If you’re juggling multiple projects at work and home, Sunsama is worth a try. It helps you plan, prioritize, and manage personal and professional to-do lists. By tracking goals and performance, Sunsama lets you control your workload, not vice versa.
Great for Teams Using Multiple Apps
Does your company use Slack, Trello, Asana, Jira, Google or Outlook for team projects?
With so many productivity tools in play, focus suffers. Sunsama integrates with popular apps, so you can consolidate all the productivity apps and access everything you need in one place.
Look Elsewhere If:
You need a completely free daily planner app. Apps like Todoist and Trello offer more robust free plans, albeit with limitations. If you’re on a tight budget, these may work better.
You manage highly complex, long-term team projects. While Sunsama handles some team collaboration, its sweet spot is daily planning and task management. For cross-functional initiatives spanning teams, or months or years, it likely won’t have the advanced project management features you need.
You want automated scheduling. Sunsama provides some auto-scheduling but doesn’t completely remove the planning process. It revolves on the philosophy of mindful planning. Other AI-based apps focus more heavily on removing the planning process entirely through automated scheduling and optimization.
Why Planning is Essential for Productivity and Happiness?
Life often feels like a juggling act, trying to balance family, work, and self-care. Without a plan, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed by everything on your plate. As a result, we often fall into the trap of procrastination.
You may not realize it, but both planning and procrastinating can help ease anxiety temporarily. However, research based on 2,000 decision-makers reveals that planners experience 37% less stress and 28% higher task completion rates, plus more joy compared to those who procrastinate.
This is where daily and weekly planners can come to the rescue. The benefits of daily planning include:
Reduced anxiety by setting realistic goals instead of an unattainable workload. You feel accomplishment, not constant failure.
Increased productivity by mapping out priorities so important tasks don’t slip through the cracks of your to-do lists.
Improved concentration by zeroing in on high-impact activities, and minimizing distractions during your workday.
Enhanced organization by optimizing task management and workflows so you aren’t bogged down hunting for items across disjointed software.
This Sunsama review explores how this user-friendly productivity app helps you reap the rewards of planning.
What is Sunsama?
Sunsama is an intuitive productivity tool for mindful daily planning.
Users love Sunsama because it neatly combines task management, calendar app, and communication with teams into one seamless platform.
Sunsama is designed to keep you organized, focused, and on top of personal and team priorities so you can achieve your most meaningful goals.
Sunsama Review: Key benefits
Here’s how Sunsama helps you maximize the rewards of planning:
Building a habit of organizing and planning your day with Sunsama’s intuitive interface is a breeze. Create tasks and detailed to-do lists, schedule work-related and personal tasks on your calendar to stay on top of your priorities, and watch your productivity soar.
Being accountable and improving your organizational skills is easy by using Sunsama’s weekly review to reflect on accomplishments, identify areas needing improvement, and set goals to keep you focused.
Analyzing how you spend your time, including how much each activity takes, is simplified with Sunsama’s built-in timer and features like weekly objectives or past-day reflection. Identify time wasters and optimize your schedule.
Acting as an integration hub, Sunsama syncs with your favorite project management and all your productivity tools like Trello, Todoist, or ClickUp, so everything is streamlined in one place. Less flipping between apps means more time for what matters.
How Does Sunsama Work? A Mindful Approach
Sunsama encourages building the habit of planning each day. Its step-by-step daily planning process provides a framework to make planning a lasting routine.
Unlike some task management apps aimed at maximizing daily tasks, Sunsama lets you slow down to focus on prioritizing and deep work. Think of Sunsama as a mindful daily planner.
Why I love and recommend Sunsama: Highlighting the Upsides
As a busy professional balancing work, family, projects, and goals, I’m always seeking tools for simple productivity and have tried many. I have to say Sunsama is special – it’s one of the best in its category.
Here’s what I really like about Sunsama and why I recommend it:
Get Productive Fast
I appreciate how Sunsama has such a low learning curve. Its intuitive interface lets me quickly start planning and managing tasks after beginning the free trial.
Using Sunsama is effortless, thanks to the user-friendly workspace. I toggle between the calendar and task list views to plan my day. Drag and drop and built-in features like timer accelerate my workflow.
Sunsama brings calm, organized productivity through its simplicity. The planner clicks with how my brain works. I stay organized with less effort, thanks to its intuitive design.
Streamlined Planning for Beginners and Experts Alike
As a planning app, Sunsama makes it easy for beginners to build daily planning habits while also optimizing experienced planners’ workflows.
For those new to planning your day, Sunsama provides guided prompts for reflecting, setting objectives, and scheduling tasks. These features turn organization into an intuitive ritual.
Meanwhile, seasoned planners can appreciate how Sunsama streamlines your workflow. The app’s seamless time blocking and task management features let you focus on execution rather than setup.
Even as an experienced planner, I think Sunsama enhances my workflow. It helps me stick to proven techniques like time blocking that I let slip over time. Sunsama shows me new ways to optimize planning through features like the daily shutdown.
By meeting planners where we are, while gently optimizing our approaches, Sunsama helps both new and experienced users build sustainable productivity.
Sunsama is perfect for those getting into planning and those looking to level up their existing planning skills.
Reflect and Improve for Growth
What I love about Sunsama is how it helps me reflect on my days and weeks to understand where my time goes and how aligned my activities are with my goals.
Sunsama is built with powerful reflection features like the “Reflect” prompt and “Weekly Review” ritual. Using Sunsama’s Reflect lets me review what I accomplished the day before, what I had planned but didn’t finish, and how I felt about my workload. This helps me appreciate my progress while identifying areas for improvement.
The Weekly Review analyzes how I spent time on objectives and tasks for the week. It shows if my time investment matched my goals or if certain activities dragged me off track. With these insights, I can adjust my schedule and task management to focus on what matters most.
Small moments of Sunsama reflection compound over time into significant personal and professional growth.
Sunsama really makes me feel accountable and grows my self-awareness. My organizational skills have leveled up thanks to consistently using Sunsama to analyze and improve.
Centralized Planning Hub
Another reason I like Sunsama is its centralized workspace consolidating all my tasks, calendar events, and notes in one place.
It saves me from constantly toggling between my Google or Outlook calendar and separate to-do list apps. Sunsama brings everything together on its intuitive interface.
Plus, Sunsama acts as an integration hub connecting my favorite productivity tools. It syncs with apps like Trello to display my tasks from different platforms in one unified view.
No longer scattered across apps, my workday is streamlined. With Sunsama as my productivity epicenter, I can finally see the full picture and work more efficiently.
A Planner that Cares
We often struggle to draw the line between work and personal life. It’s easy to get caught up working late into the evening.
Sunsama helps you prioritize daily tasks but also cares about your mental health.
At the end of each workday, Sunsama prompts a “Daily Shutdown” ritual. This reminds you to wrap up any final tasks, jot down plans for tomorrow, and reflect on the day. More importantly, it encourages you to stop working and fully disconnect.
By nudging you to shut down work mode on time, Sunsama encourages you to maintain boundaries and prevents burnout.
I love Sunsama for this thoughtful feature that promotes a healthy work-life balance. It’s built to boost productivity without pushing you past your limits.
Superb Customer Support
Getting started with any new productivity app can feel daunting. But Sunsama makes learning a breeze through clear user guides and videos.
If I’m ever confused about how to integrate my Outlook or Google calendar or utilize features of Sunsama, I reference the online User Manual. It walks through every functionality in simple terms, along with demos.
I appreciate how Sunsama anticipates questions and the desire for self-sufficiency. Between easy-to-find docs and responsive customer support, I can quickly master even advanced workflows like how to read emails directly in Sunsama and drag them into daily planner as tasks.
With Sunsama’s stellar educational resources, I never feel stuck. I can focus on planning my day, not learning the software.
Discussing the Downsides
The Price Point of Sunsama
Sunsama is priced at $20 per month, which is on the higher end for productivity apps. The rationale is that Sunsama provides robust features and an exceptional user experience. However, the cost could deter some users, especially students or those on a tight budget.
While Sunsama might not be accessible to everyone, the app could still provide immense value for busy professionals who bill at high hourly rates. For them, the monthly fee may be negligible compared to the productivity boost Sunsama provides. There are also cheaper alternatives that offer similar core features.
Limited Mobile App
This digital planner promotes itself as a “desktop-first”, and mobile version of Sunsama has limited functionality. You cannot fully plan or manage tasks from the mobile app. Instead, it serves more as a read-only agenda.
This condensed experience is understandable, given Sunsama’s intricate interface. Planning via desktop provides the full experience. However, some users who are frequently on-the-go may desire fuller mobile capabilities.
On the bright side, Sunsama’s mobile app lets you view your daily agenda and quickly capture mobile notes or tasks to sync later. So it retains some helpful mobile utility.
Handling Complex Team Projects
While Sunsama shines for personal productivity, its features may not suffice for complex team projects. Sunsama focuses on daily and weekly planning, lacking robust project management functionality.
Sunsama’s simplicity streamlines individual workflows. But multi-faceted team projects with many moving parts require greater customization and project oversight. An alternative to Sunsama, like Motion, may better suit collaborative enterprise initiatives.
That said, Sunsama still enables helpful transparency through its team features and integrates with many project management tools like Asana or ClickUp.
It works well as a supplemental hub for aligning team members rather than the primary project management tool.
Sunsama Review: Daily Planner Features
Reflect on Yesterday
I appreciate how Sunsama helps you plan by first reflecting on yesterday. I love using this reflective stage to understand my work patterns. Taking time to review my accomplishments, time breakdowns, and unfinished tasks brings calm intention to my mornings.
Seeing planned versus actual task times through Reflect is eye-opening. I now allot more reasonable timeframes. Reflect’s Categories reveal where my hours go and help ensure time aligns with priorities.
Overall, reflecting each morning with Sunsama allows me to start centered and mindful. By learning from yesterday, I can plan today smarter.
Adding Tasks
The “Add Tasks” stage is my favorite part of Sunsama’s daily planning flow. Here, I compile everything I hope to accomplish for the day ahead. Sunsama makes this process simple by letting you integrate all of your productivity apps.
I can manually create new tasks or drag and drop existing ones from tools like Trello, Todoist, and Asana. Turning emails and Slack messages into actionable to-do items is a game-changer. No more distracting rabbit holes!
For each task added, I estimate how long it will take. This prevents overstuffing my schedule. Comparing planned versus actual durations over time has honed my forecasting skills.
With my daily to-do list populated in Sunsama, I can dive into deep work on my top priorities. Emails and messages wait patiently as tasks until I’m ready to engage.
By frontloading intention into my mornings with Sunsama, I work smarter, not harder. My days feel focused yet flexible thanks to its frictionless task aggregation.
Avoiding Overload
As a daily planner for busy professionals, Sunsama helps you pinpoint what’s essential, eliminating everything else. I encourage you not to skip this optional “Push Back Tasks” stage. In my experience, it has been invaluable for avoiding overload.
Initially, I stuffed my Sunsama schedule with endless ambitions. But attempting 12+ hour workdays left me drained and discouraged.
Now, I let Sunsama filter my grand plans. When my workload appears unrealistic, it prompts me to bump non-critical tasks to tomorrow or my Backlog.
This purge of “nice-to-dos” focuses my energy on must-do priorities. I plan around my work capacity and calendar commitments. Sunsama ensures I have a realistic, fulfillable agenda.
Ending each day feeling accomplished, not frustrated, has been a game changer.
By spotlighting the essentials, Sunsama helps me work smarter and maintain sanity. I’m learning that less can indeed be more.
Final Planning Steps
Completing my daily planning in Sunsama ends with optimizing and sharing my schedule. These final rituals enhance my productivity and alignment with teammates.
First, I finalize task order using Sunsama features like time blocking or the Playlist Method. Time blocking is great for busy calendars. Playlist allows flexibility if I have open blocks of time.
I also set a work stoppage time. Honoring this “shutdown” hour prevents burnout and maintains work-life balance. It’s a simple yet powerful Sunsama concept.
Finally, I can publish my plan summary to colleagues via Slack. This asynchronous sharing keeps us aligned without meetings. I can also engage in the evening planning for a headstart tomorrow.
These closing planning stages helped me end my Sunsama sessions intentionally. With each day wrapped up thoroughly, I feel focused, purposeful, and bonded with my team. My mornings gain direction through Sunsama’s complete daily workflow.
Sunsama Pricing
Sunsama offers transparent, upfront pricing with two straightforward options:
Opt for a yearly ride and grab a 20% discount, landing at $16, billed annually
Not quite ready to tie the knot? Choose a monthly option $20 per month billed monthly
I appreciate their integrity in charging whole dollar amounts – no odd decimal points or penny-pinching.
The predictable options give confidence in investing long-term without feeling nickel-and-dimed. After trying Sunsama myself, I found the productivity value well worth the price.
Does Sunsama offer a Freemium option?
Sunsama is upfront in not offering a permanently free plan.
However, their generous 14-day free trial – no credit card required provides ample time to experience the app. This allows assessing if the productivity value justifies the price before committing. I found this trial period sufficient to determine if Sunsama was a worthwhile investment.
Now, why no free plan? Sunsama has a clear stance explained in their pricing manifesto.
They believe charging for their service means they’re committed to delivering a quality app. They avoid the freemium model as it can incentivize unwanted requests, steering them away from their main goal: building a valuable tool.
I appreciate Sunsama’s straightforward approach. Their pricing reflects the value they provide, and it’s a small investment for something like Sunsama that helps bring order to my daily chaos.
Top Sunsama Alternatives for Task Management
For those seeking Sunsama alternatives, here are my top 3 picks:
Automated Scheduling with Motion
Motion uses AI to automatically schedule your calendar based on availability, preferences, and tasks. It also provides robust project management and collaboration capabilities. Its meeting scheduling assistant is really fantastic, it fully replaces tools like Calendly.
If you want an automated personal assistant, Motion is a great option. However, with all the AI and automation, it takes a completely different approach to planning and lacks Sunsama’s guided planning flow and rituals.
Simplify Scheduling with Trevor AI
Trevor AI excels at visually scheduling your days using time blocks. You can drag and drop tasks onto your calendar, and Trevor suggests optimal time slots.
Trevor provides smart task duration assignments and scheduling optimization. But it has fewer high-level workflow features compared to Sunsama.
Simple Task Manager with Todoist
With Todoist, you can quickly create task lists and check off to-dos on any device. While not as fully featured as Sunsama, Todoist is a simple, intuitive personal task management tool.
For basic individual productivity needs, Todoist is a great cost-effective option. However, Sunsama offers more robust time tracking, planning, and team features.
These alternatives have unique strengths. But for a daily workflow, Sunsama’s balance of mindful planning, focus mode, and integrations remains unmatched.
Sunsama Review Verdict: Should you invest in Sunsama?
Have you forgotten something as pivotal as picking your child from the nursery or turned up at the client meeting unprepared because you totally forgot about the appointment? These stories really drive home the reality of our modern-day hustle. It’s a mad rush, and without a trusted system to rely on, it’s easy to drop the ball on crucial life tasks.
After reviewing Sunsama’s features and my experience using this productivity app daily, I can wholeheartedly recommend it for transforming your daily planning.
As I conclude this Sunsama Review 2023, here are the core takeaways from my journey with Sunsama:
User-Friendly Interface: It’s straightforward, making planning less of a chore and more of a breeze.
Daily Planning Ritual: Sunsama transitions planning from a mundane task to a daily ritual, nurturing a habit that sticks.
Seamless Integrations: Having all my tasks under one roof has been a major time-saver, no more app-hopping.
Realistic Planning: It’s a reality check, helping me focus on what’s achievable, sidelining the overwhelm.
Reflection: Looking back at my day and adjusting the sails for tomorrow has become an insightful routine.
While no app is perfect, Sunsama comes very close. Its intuitive interface, mindful philosophy, and helpful reflection have leveled up my personal productivity.
If you feel like you’re juggling too many commitments, tasks, and tools, give Sunsama a shot. Let it be your partner for balanced, meaningful days. The improvements to your focus, organization, and inner calm will speak for themselves.
Take control of your hours and attention. Start planning purposefully with your free Sunsama trial today.
