The Weekly Review: Vol VII Issue 15
Hello friends,
I hope things are well for you. If you have children, I hope the transition back to school (whether online or in the building) was smooth. Here in our home, all four of the kids are in full-time school, and the change has gone well for everyone. Mom and dad included!
But it hasn’t come without some costs. Full time school means a lot more driving. On top of that, we’re seeing teachers wanting to get in field trips early in the year, in the event that COVID picks up and we go back into lock-down mode. All that to say, life has been busy in September. Hence the long stretch between emails from me.
On that note, my busy days had me revisiting an old post I write two years back: How to recover when things get overwhelming. Full inboxes, and tasks in the margins of my notebook have me looking for a moment to breath and recollect myself.
Thank goodness the quarter is coming to an end!
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Sunsama
I have done well to stay away from new productivity apps the past couple of years. I’m still using Things as my main repository of projects and AoR (areas of responsibility) — this has not changed since Things 3 arrived and I wrote about it for The Sweet Setup.
The biggest change in recent years has been the use of pen and paper for daily planning and tracking. I still do this today (currently with a Do Journal from Baron Fig, but I’m also looking forward to Analog from Ugmonk).
However, I recently invested some time into trying a new entrant in this category. Not pen and paper, but an application. It’s called Sunsama.
I heard about this earlier in the summer, but it was invite only to start and I chose not to act on the invite to a private demo from the team. But when my coworker Amy mentioned using it, I gave it a second look. And it brought enough benefit that I keep going back to it.
First, what’s good about it? Well, it’s not the nice design or the focus on integrations. Instead, it’s the baked-in workflow. Take that away and it’s just like so many other options available today.
There’s a reason it’s described this way on their home page:
The daily planner for elite professionals
Elite aside, this is a good description — it’s a tool for planning your time. Rather than be a place to house all your tasks, Sunsama is just focused on what you want to get done today. That’s a powerful habit to get into.
And what’s really nice about the tool is the workflow. Each day, you start by identifying what you want to get done today. Tasks from the day before that are still not completed are available to be assigned to today. But you can also add new tasks that come to mind or are coming due.
One nice aspect of this service is that you can keep your projects documented elsewhere. Sunsama works nicely with your existing tools. You can add tasks to your day manually, or you can use one of the integrations to see your work and drag and drop the appropriate tasks.
If you use the integrated service, this means Sunsama can place nicely with team collaboration, something that has been an issue for GTD folks who like to use tools like Things or Omnifocus.
Good habits
The workflow is based around this daily flow of planning only the things you think you can get done each day. But there are a few others that are implicit in its design.
The first is time-blocking. Your calendar is a major piece of focus in Sunsama. While you collate a list of tasks each day, you can use your emails or your calendar for the day to create those tasks. But you can also choose to view the app in two different ways: with your tasks in focus and the calendar in the sidebar, or the other way around. If you use the latter, you can drag and drop each task into your calendar, similar to the process people like Cal Newport or Shawn Blanc advocate.
The second is tracking where your time goes. At any point, you can open a task and then put it into focus. This functionality includes a timer that you can click. Now you’re able to record how long your tasks take you.
Of course, time tracking is always an activity ripe for inaccuracy as you often switch between different tasks (at least, I do). But that’s exactly the kind of thing Sunsama is aimed to help you with — to focus on one thing at a time. And if you can manage that, you have this useful bit of information about how long things take.
Related to time tracking, Sunsama also lets you use the Pomodoro technique. The tracker and focus mode include the option to take a Break. The timer will switch to use a different title and is set to a default amount of time.
And when the week comes to an end, the app encourages you to perform a weekly review. The UI for this is not robust — it simply asks you three contemplative questions. However, encouraging the habit is a good addition, and you could use this to perform a full fledged check of your current situation.
Last, Sunsama starts to tie all these things together. It also makes tracking progress and reporting easier. In conjunction with the timing functionality, you can assign each task to a channels (think of categories or tags). If you do this effectively, the weekly review functionality shows you how your time was spent across each channel.
As well, at the end of each day’s planning session, you are given a summary of what you’ve done and what you have planned for the day. This summary can be posted automatically to Slack (if you integrate it), or you can copy and paste it into the tool of your choice. For teams using an app like Geekbot (or some other automated daily stand-up replacement), the is also pretty slick.
At any rate, the workflow is great, and so are all the small touches in the service (even the onboarding emails from the CEO are useful). If this sounds at all enticing to you, use my referral link to check it out. I’ve been converted and am happily paying for the tool.
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Items of note
This was a nice touch from the Allbirds team. They sent an email that was not marketing focused, but rather was helping me care for the shoes I’d already purchased (well, that’s still marketing … it’s just good, non-smarmy marketing.)
I’d like to see this kind of things from more manufacturers!
Julian sets the stage for his review of the new email service, Hey:
After playing around with it for a few weeks, my conclusion is this: Hey’s most interesting aspect is not its radical approach to email – but its fresh approach to note taking!
As he gets into his ideas about notes, and how Hey is a fresh approach, he descrines the problem he sees with the current state of our digital tools:
To-do and reminder apps (and calendars!) work great for tasks that are tied to a specific day or time. But many tasks – and especially notes – are not dependent on time. Their relevance is based on other trigger points. Only when certain conditions are met, should these notes resurface: “If [insert event] is true, then show [note]”
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, from André Chaperon:
The inefficiencies of a system (or lack of a system) don’t become apparent until we need to retrieve the information we’ve previously been exposed to; information we’ve already deemed important. … and then can’t find the info or recall where you saw it.
Click through to read the entire post. You may not agree with all his ideas, but the effort of picturing a different kind of tool is worth the time.
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Quote of the week
In this week’s Church at Home, we are looking at the Hebrew word me’od, which is translated as strength in the ancient Hebrew prayer known as the Shema. In the prayer, listeners are called to love the Lord with all their heart, soul, and me’od (that is, strength). But the Hebrew word technically means “very” or “much.” So while it might sound funny, this famous verse could also be translated, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your muchness.” What do you have much of? Sometimes we love having much instead of using what we have to love God and others. How do we avoid hoarding our muchness to enjoy the freedom of loving Godwith everything we are?
Job Collins, The Bible Project church at home series
I loved this concept when I first heard it — loving God with my muchness. What is my muchness? What are my passions, and talents, and how can I use them for his glory? A great concept to ponder, and slight shift in how I’ve thought about the Shema.
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Currently
Drinking: a couple of kind readers who are involved with Revolver Coffee in Vancouver, BC, honoured me with a gift a few weeks back. They sent over several bags of delicious coffee beans. All were delicious — thank you, kind readers!
Reading: I’m enjoying a re-read of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series in preparation for the November release of Rhythm of War (the fourth instalment).
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Well, I hope the next issue isn’t four to five weeks down the road. But work is busy these days, and so is the home life. And with the US presidential debate that just took place, and with the election looming large, who knows what the weeks ahead will hold.
But I take solace in the fact that I have a king is who is the opposite of what we see before us. Humble, not brash. Selfless, not self-serving. He leads with authority, but not bravado. And above everything, he is compassionate and seeks to lift the burdens of the weary and the downcast. Let’s use that for hope, and for guiding our own actions.