Automatically Schedule Tasks to Calendar
complete
Travis Meyer
complete
We have just released the ability to auto-reschedule your remaining tasks for the day when a task takes longer (or shorter) than originally scheduled.
You can read the announcement here: https://roadmap.sunsama.com/changelog/auto-reschedule, and a more in-depth guide here: https://help.sunsama.com/docs/auto-rescheduling.
With this functionality complete, we have now built all the major auto-scheduling functionalities we had planned, and are marking this feature request as completed.
If there are more nuanced behaviors related to auto-scheduling you'd like to see added or improved, please add/upvote on those as separate feature requests going forward.
Thanks to everyone for all of your feedback. The feedback here was hugely helpful in thinking through a lot of the design nuances needed to make sure the automated behavior was up-to-par.
Jon van Gelder
Travis Meyer: I'm coming over from Motion and what is considered "auto-scheduling" on Sunsama isn't fully auto-scheduling because I still have to press a button or drag and drop each individual task into the calendar in the order of priority. In Motion you can just set the priority of each tasks when you're creating them, and then Motion automatically populates all tasks onto your calendar according to those priority levels. It also auto-reschedules if 30 minutes have passed after the task was set to be completed and you haven't marked it as completed, etc. This removes a lot of the tedious work of me having to manually shift my calendar around when things change. Sumsama's UI is way nicer but it doesn't fully leverage automation to reduce mental load — it feels like one more platform I now have to manage manually.
Travis Meyer
Jon van Gelder: thanks for the feedback here.
We opted to take a lighter touch than Motion does when it comes to automatically scheduling things on your calendar. If what you want is full automation just like Motion, it's likely Sunsama won't be the right fit.
When designing our own version of auto-scheduling, we consistently heard feedback from folks who had tried Motion that Motion felt too opinionated and proactive when it came to scheduling things, and they ended up spending more time correcting automated scheduling decisions as a result. We likely won't try and make fuzzy inferences like auto-rescheduling a task if it's 30 minutes after it's scheduled completion time (maybe you did actually finish it but just haven't had time to check it off in Sunsama yet).
We also value being intentional with your time, and think leaning too hard into automation takes away from that. We likely won't add a 'automatically schedule all tasks to calendar' button with this in mind.
All that being said, our current version of auto-scheduling isn't perfect, and the fact that you still feel like there's a lot of manual tedium around making your calendar match your intention means there's likely still improvements that could be made.
If you notice a particular scenario where you feel like you have to spend a lot of time manually adjusting things in Sunsama in response to a change of plans, could you try and describe that in detail for us?
From your original message, the two scenarios I gathered are:
- At the start of your day, it's cumbersome to hover over each task one by one and press 'X' to autoschedule, rather than just having a single button/step which autoschedules all your tasks for you.
- Over the course of the day, plans change, and you end up not working on a task you had scheduled. It's cumbersome to have to manually remove this task for your schedule and adjust your remaining schedule for the day. You wish this task would have been automatically removed and rescheduled once it's been 30 minutes after it's original scheduled end time.
I'm wondering if there are others.
Marjorie MacIntosh
Travis Meyer: I completely agree with Ashutosh on point #1. It's cumbersome to have to go through each task and press x to auto-schedule at the beginning of each day.
From a user behavior standpoint, don't you think if I am using X to auto-schedule each instance that I am very likely to do that with the majority of my tasks? And hence, wouldn't it just be easier to press X and have all the tasks for the day put on my calendar at once?
I don't think this takes away from one's intentionality with their time for these reasons:
- I have intentionally set up schedules with rules that allow the auto-schedule to plan things with intention.
- My ideal workflow would be as follows:
I schedule the tasks manually that I know I want to do around a certain time of day or that have a higher priority. Then I press a single button to auto-schedule all the tasks around it (and, of course, around the calendar rules I have set up).
Right now, I manually schedule important tasks, and then I have to go through and press x for each additional task. That seems silly and a minor waste of time.
Alex Cunningham
Hey folks,
We have a neat little update that will better support auto-scheduling a task whose channel does not have schedule availability set up for today.
Let's say you want to auto-schedule a task today (Wednesday), but you've set up the schedule of that tasks channel to only have hours on Fridays. Or there's simply no available time left in today's schedule.
When you attempt to auto-schedule the task, you'll see the "Overcommitted" pop up. But now, there is a third option: "Schedule another day", which will allow you to auto-schedule that task to the next available slot/day for that schedule. Here's a quick demo of the new feature: https://www.loom.com/share/0e0913eaa8d2478babd185c157180198
S
Scoot Vrooms
Alex Cunningham: That is great, thanks for this, much appreciated!
Can you also make it so that if you have a task/project with multiple subtasks that you estimate takes a total of 3 hours. Then if you have 30 min available in your schedule today, that if you press ''X'', it will schedule for 30 min today and the remaining 2.5 hours for the next available schedule. Thanks!
Mayank Bhola
Alex Cunningham is the above feature already available? And I agree with Scoot Vrooms. Is that something which will be possible with the above features?
Dataecstasy
can routine tasks be automatically planned and populated into calendar and can be custom edited at the time of next day/week planning?
Peter Vaillancourt
Dataecstasy : I think this is possible currently. For example, I have a recurring task for my "Morning Routine" including subtasks, and I have set it up to recur every day in Sunsama. It is not assigned to my calendar, but I have sometimes added it to my calendar the day of, or during planning, to help me see my day more clearly. I haven't tried to add the entire series to the calendar, but you could try it... I suppose you could also do the reverse (set up a recurring calendar event daily) and only add it as a task in Sunsama for the days you like. I hope this helps!
Dataecstasy
Peter Vaillancourt: yes Peter. thanks for your reply. However As you have tried and know you know that you'll have to add those recurring tasks/subtasks at the time next planning. But i have tried all and you can not add the entire series. the way is to add to the calendar and pull it from there in sunsama. so sunsama isn't a tool to sort of plan out your complete day in totality and be your governing tool for entire rather you have to rely partly on separate google calendar for things like this. you can only plan out your work with sunsama instead whole day which i got wrong in the beginning. also when you start a task from back it moves out of the backlog it doesn't stay in the backlog if it's not marked on everyday's calendar. there seems to be some gaps between planning/backlog management and scheduling.
Alex Cunningham
Dataecstasy : Correct; you aren't able to add the entire series of recurring tasks to the calendar. However, you can set an "at roughly" time on a recurring task, then auto-schedule it with
x
each day to place it on the calendar at that time. And as Peter Vaillancourt mentioned, you could consider creating a repeating calendar event if the task occurs at the same time each instance. Here's more info on that: https://help.sunsama.com/docs/task-management#should-recurring-work-be-a-recurring-task-or-a-recurring-eventI'm a little confused when you say you can't plan your whole day or only work in Sunsama, could you elaborate?
And yes, if you start running the timer on a task in the backlog it will move the task to today's column, as Sunsama now considers you are working on that task today. When stop working on the task, you can move it back to the backlog if you'd like, and the time you worked on the task will be logged in today's column as well.
Dataecstasy
Alex Cunningham: I need a bit of clarification now...what is additional feature in sunsama which is not possible using google calendar and tasks. Sad but I reached this critical point despite of my enthusiasm when I stumbled upon sunsama. I need points/features...also aesthetics won't be a feature.
Alex Cunningham
Dataecstasy : What would you like clarification on? Feel free to reach out to me with your questions directly at alex [at] sunsama.com
Mike Kastellec
Alex Cunningham: incidentally, both of these suggestions -- recurring calendar event that is added to tasks daily, or recurring sunsama event + at roughly + auto scheduled -- are the best answers I've yet seen for how to handle daily start up tasks, which I recently opened a help ticket about. I suggest adding these suggestions to the FAQ
Alex Cunningham
Mike Kastellec: Thanks for this response and suggestion. It actually is in the help center, but it's under "Tasks" not in the FAQ section. Great suggestion, I'll add a make an item in the FAQ page so that's clearer. Thanks!
Hesham Elbashandy
Ashutosh Priyadarshy - I find it quite annoying that in focused mode, while still being on task, Sunsama don't realize that and still have other tasks on the Calendar for the other scheduled block. It also feels like a huge disconnect between both features (scheduler and focused mode); Which is something I never saw being missed by Sunsama so far on other features. Instead, what I'd like is Sunsama to be helping me pushing things around without having to worry about it. Otherwise, it gets very distracting to re-assign tasks manually to the calendar blocks after to move things around to extend current block and so while being "focused".
This suggestion doesn't take the intentional aspect of Sunsama away IMO and adds tremendous value by removing scheduling anxiety and distractions. I think this specific aspect of the scheduler, would be a configurations game too, to allow users to enable/disable the scheduler shifting of blocks based on the focused mode.
I was wondering if there is a plan to release that ability any time soon?
AndyDaSilva52 😎
Hesham Elbashandy: I'm not sure, but I guess Motion has a better experience in this case.
I tried to use Motion, but Sunsama was my choice at the end. They have some superb features, like for example:
- replace Calendly - improvement request here for Sunsama also
- a better experience for schedule with a team
- calendar sync (ex: Personal to Work) - improvement request here for Sunsama also
Skyler Nelson
Just adding my 2 cents. The way motion handles this is pretty great. I’m over here cause it’s buggy. But being able to set a due date and a priority and have it find the best time for that task would be a game changer. Planning every single task every single day is time consuming and quite frankly a waste of time.
Rino Cheng
Skyler Nelson: I’ve tried Motion. Yes it is a buggy app. But not sure about you, but for me, having to daily plan, the intention of placing your task by giving them planned time quickly with “w” and placing them in today’s calendar gives me a sense of direction instead of always letting Motion plan my day for me. Sometimes, it doesn’t plan the way I want to. Plus, Sunsama already have priorities. It is just the order of the boards. Top to bottom in terms of priority.
Jack Mitchell
Please bring autoscheduling to the iOS app -- so that when I create and categorize and estimate work time for a new task for the day the app can find a place for it (or tell me that the day is full) based on the existing autoscheduling preferences
0110 0110
please not just based on time available but also grouping tasks by #channel preferably.
Jeremy Drennen
I'm hoping this will automatically schedule to different times of the day based off of which tag it has assigned to it - Work, Personal etc. That would be really cool. It would be nice if we could check off the tasks right on the calendar. It would also be nice that if I didn't check off that the item was completed, that it would automatically reschedule the task, Meaning it would assume that I hadn't actually completed the task, Or at least give an option?
Reclaim has similar functionality, however, its difficult to reschedule if you didn't actually complete those tasks as assigned and it assumes that you completed the items after the scheduled time has passed.
Excited for what this will bring.
Leif Arne Storset
It's great that this is being implemented! I am confused about one thing: Why are not planned task durations taken into account? Instead, there is a default duration that overrides what I had set in the task itself. Whether I plan to spend 10 minutes or 2 hours on a task, it always shows up in the calendar as 30 minutes (or another fixed amount of time). Furthermore, the planned time in the task itself is temporarily overridden.
Alex Cunningham
Leif Arne Storset: This sounds like a bug! Can you chat us using the Intercom bubble in the bottom right of Sunsama?
Olli Tiainen
Let's say I have a task that I've blocked 3 hours for a task. I enter focus, and work on the task for 60 min, then go for a 30 min break, and then continue working on it for another 60 minutes, and manage to complete the task in 2.5 hours. I'd like Sunsama to block the focus times (60+30+60) on my calendar so the calendar at the end of the day will reflect on the actual time spent on different tasks. This way, if I've completed a task earlier than planned, that planned excess time would be freed up for other tasks that Sunsama could autosuggest or -schedule.
This would also have the additional benefit of making the evaluation of my working habits much easier.
Anne Mydla
Olli Tiainen: I agree, this would be awesome Ashutosh Priyadarshy
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