We started Sunsama because we wanted a tool to help us be thoughtful and intentional with our time as we navigated the stress, pressure, and ambition of work. Over the past five years, we’ve been hyper-focused on “daily planning” and helping our customers be thoughtful and intentional about the current day.
In our initial launch in 2018, Sunsama was just a list of tasks per-day side by side with your calendar. We’ve come a long way, adding lots of project management, calendar, and email integrations. Adding daily planning and reflection rituals. We rolled out a mobile app, desktop apps, focus modes and more as a way to help you get control over the day in front of you.
We always knew that the day would come where we’d need to evolve beyond a daily planner. But we didn’t want to rush out of this niche and get sucked into building just another task management app that’s a race to the bottom in pricing and a race to build the longest list of features. Our belief has always been that building the tool that lets customers plan realistic, calm, and ambitious days would be a clarifying force when the time came to build a more fully-featured task manager. And being recently recognized as Wirecutter’s top pick for AI scheduling apps reaffirmed our approach and gave us a small nod that we're on the right path.
This is where you find us today.
Beyond the Daily Planner
In 2025, we’re committed to delivering more than just a daily planner.
Over the years, we’ve learned so much about how ambitious professionals, think, organize, and execute work. It’s helped us update our vision for what Sunsama could be, and how we can deliver an experience that drives intentionality and ensures your daily work aligns with professional goals.
The Sunsama you know today: a daily planner for everyone.
The Sunsama we are working towards: a task manager for modern professionals.
Our vision is to build a task manager that’s specifically designed for the realities and complexities of modern knowledge work. Sunsama will allow ambitious professionals like you to:
- aggregate and triage tasks, calendars, and emails all in one place
- plan and execute focused days and weeks
- track progress against longer term professional goals
- quickly document daily and weekly progress.
What you can expect in 2025
In the coming months, we’ll be releasing a mix of big and small features. Given the scale and complexity of these, we’re not locking into specific dates just yet, but we wanted to give you a look into the upcoming roadmap. Here’s what to expect.
Stage 1: A Real Backlog
We’re planning to finally deliver a real “backlog” - a place for tasks you need to do but aren’t ready to commit to on a certain day yet.
This is the most popular request amongst brand new users and loyal customers. In Sunsama’s current format, it feels like tasks are now or never and that’s just not a realistic way to work. We avoided this for so long because we didn’t want to build another task management tool that becomes a task graveyard with tags and filters and projects and all the other stuff every app has. We’ve now got a clear vision of how a backlog can fit elegantly with the rest of the product without becoming feature bloat.
This is something we’re hoping to get into your hands in the first half of the year.
Backlogs are scary though. Most of the tasks never get done and the rest just pile up and taunt you. We’re aware of this and once we’ve got the basics of a backlog up and running for you, we’ll turn our focus to making sure the tasks in there get intelligently surfaced into your daily plan and your calendar automatically in a way that aligns with your objectives and priorities.
We want you to get Type-A results at work, without all the anxious effort of being a Type-A person.
Stage 2: Timeboxing 2.0
Putting your daily tasks on your calendar is the best way to visualize your time and energy commitments but it can feel like a huge chore to manage even if you use Sunsama’s automatic timeboxing and auto-rescheduling to do most of the work.
For the past several weeks, we’ve been using and working on a new version of Timeboxing internally that automatically fills in your day with tasks and adjusts to your schedule in real-time without you ever needing to timebox a single task manually or automatically. This new version, Timeboxing 2.0, gives you all the benefits of visualizing your tasks on the calendar but requires no effort and maintenance on your end.
In fact, in all these years of building Sunsama, I rarely timebox because it feels like such an effort when things go off track or plans change. In just a couple weeks of using Timeboxing 2.0 and our new Sunsama Calendar, I’ve become a bonafide timeboxer but I didn’t have to do anything extra.
We’re excited to roll this super-power out to everyone. It’s an intricate feature that touches every major part of the product so don’t expect it until the second half of the year.
Stage 3: Objectives 2.0
As professionals, we want to make sure that the work we do each day is aligned with the bigger picture. I want to know if the work I did today is moving my big picture professional goals forward whether they’re weekly, monthly, quarterly or career goals.
To date, Sunsama’s goal setting has been myopic, giving you nothing more than the ability to connect a task back to a weekly objective. Our last big goal for the year is to give you a way to organize your objectives and align tasks to them that actually fits with how you organize your work as a modern professional.
When Objectives 2.0 rolls out, it should be effortless for you to know how each of your daily tasks contributed to bigger goals and to look at a goal and see all the work you’ve done towards it over the previous days, weeks and months.
Bonus: Maybe an AI Voice Assistant?
The hardest part about planning your day is getting all the thoughts, ideas, and plans ricocheting around in your mind down onto something tangible. Whether that something is Sunsama, an index card, or a journal. It’s that process of translating messy thought-space into a clear and actionable plan that we struggle with.
We’ve been cooking up an AI Voice Assistant who will talk you through the process of turning a jumble of thoughts into a plan you can look at. We think this can be especially valuable for people who are more comfortable talking to think than writing to think.
This is our most speculative bet of the year as it leans on state-of-the-art technology. There’s a chance after some beta testing we might decide the technology just isn’t reliable enough to roll this out. But we’re giving it a shot because there’s a chance we can make it 10x easier for you to plan your day.
Building our community
As we continue to expand Sunsama's capabilities, we're excited to also build a vibrant community around thoughtful and intentional work. Beyond the features, we're committed to fostering connections among users, explore virtual events, and finding new ways to support our loyal customers. Stay tuned as we create more opportunities to come together, share ideas, and support each other on the journey to more intentional and thoughtful work.
Closing thoughts
We’re incredibly energized and eager to get all of these updates into your hands, but we want to ensure everything meets the Sunsama quality bar. As we carefully work on these updates, we’d love to hear what you think.
This is your opportunity to shape the future of Sunsama and help us craft the best task manager possible for modern professionals.
What excites you the most? What concerns you? What do you need?
Feel free to email us and share your thoughts.
We can’t wait to walk with you on the next phase of our journey.
