A Time Blocking Comparison: Sunsama vs. Fantastical

Habits change. Inspiration comes and goes. Workflows spring up and taper off. But for me, time blocking never changes. Time blocking has become fundamental to my work day, ensuring I have chunks of time to complete tasks and ensuring my colleagues know what I’m up to. Time blocking structures my day. Time blocking blocks out extra meetings. Time blocking pushes me forward.

I’m not sure if one could say there are many forms of time blocking. By and large, time blocking consists of putting tasks into your calendar with a time duration for completion. To my knowledge, nearly all forms of time blocking consist of tasks — rather than events — building out your calendar.

But some apps do structure various parts of the time blocking workflow differently. Today, I’m hoping to discuss the two apps I have the most experience with on the Mac: Sunsama and Fantastical. These are very different apps — one is a full-on productivity app with many productivity features; the other a calendar app on steroids. However, both have succeeded for me in some shape or form and both have fallen flat in other facets.

Many may not even consider Fantastical a productivity app at all. Recent updates have me thinking otherwise, though — you can now quickly drag and drop tasks into your calendar and use natural language parsing to set a duration for the task. Those tasks sync over to the built-in Reminders app or Todoist, providing integration with other productivity apps. And Fantastical also provides excellent meeting scheduling features. Think Calendly, but in a Fantastical style. Overall, I think Fantastical is right at home in any time blocking conversation.

To me, there are three major stages to a time blocked day:

1. Planning your day
2. Working through your day
3. Reviewing your day

Sunsama and Fantastical both play a role in all three stages, but differently.

Without further ado…

Planning

The planning stage for me consists of sitting down, looking at all my task silos, and building out a day to work on the most important items. I aim to complete this in 15 minutes or less. Some days I prefer granularity and specificity (“reply to this email”) and some days I prefer generalities (“email”).

Sunsama’s Planning Features

Sunsama does an incredible job helping you plan out your day. Each morning, Sunsama pings you with a reminder to build out your day. The planning process works in the following order:

1. What do you want to get done today?
2. How long will each thing take you to complete?
3. What can wait for another day?
4. How do you want the most important tasks structured in your calendar?

Sunsama rocks in the planning department. You can quickly drop all tasks you want to complete in a day in step #1. This is effectively your “Inbox” of tasks. Sunsama also integrates with Notion, Todoist, Clickup, Github, Exchange, Gmail, and more, ensuring you can actually bring in your emails and other tasks from a wide variety of apps all at once. This first step is basically the ultimate productivity inbox.

Once done, you can also tag your tasks “Work” or “Personal”, set an estimated duration time, and add any other notes to build out the task’s context. This can become quite granular and can take some time if you have many shorter duration tasks.

In step #3, you can defer the less important tasks to a future date.

In step #4, you can use some automation features by clicking a certain key to automatically build out your calendar based on the duration of each task created in step #1. Sunsama ties a tag (“work” or “personal”) to the calendar of your choice. This effectively creates a unique calendar event for each task you add in step #4 — perfect for notifying your colleagues what you’re up to each day.

Fantastical’s Planning Features

Fantastical doesn’t have a built-out planning workflow of any sort. There are no queues to sit-down and tackle your day. There are no task silos or multiple inboxes to bring in everything you want to do into one specific list. There are no pings or notifications to get you off on the right track.

However, since Fantastical integrates nicely with the Reminders app — which itself integrates with a few other apps on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac — you can still build out a planning workflow in Fantastical.

My planning workflow involves Spark (my email app), Reminders, and Fantastical. I tend to swipe important emails over from Spark to Reminders, which nicely show up inside Fantastical’s “Tasks” section.

From there, I can drag specific emails and tasks right into my calendar. Each task adds a default event with a default duration in your calendar, but you can quickly edit this by stating the number of minutes you expect the task to take by adding “[15m]” or “[120m]” to the task. Fantastical will then update the duration of the time block automatically.

The biggest hiccup for me with Fantastical’s planning process is the fact that time blocked tasks do not become calendar events. This means my colleagues can’t see what I’m doing during the day. If I need to block out time to notify my colleagues what my plans are, I’ll have to create a second generic time block within a calendar. This duplicates some of the planning work.

Action

As you work through the day, you’ll have to return to your productivity app to check in on your progress, mark tasks completed, and make changes to your plans. Again, Sunsama and Fantastical are very different in this regard.

Sunsama’s Time Tracking Features

Sunsama has two specific time tracking features some users will love:

1. Actual time tracking, i.e. tap the space bar to begin a task and track to the second how long it takes you to complete.
2. Less specific time tracking, where you notify Sunsama how long it took you to complete a task after finishing.

The first method provides an extra area to store notes as you work through the task. This works great for writing meeting minutes and referencing any other notes you added to the task when you planned out your day.

The second method is ideal for folks who get interrupted throughout the day and forget to toggle the task’s timer. This is definitely where I fall — instead of tracking down to the minute, I complete a task and mark how long it took me to complete, generally with a round estimate to the 15 minute mark.

Tracking time in Sunsama is fundamental to the last stage of time blocking: review.

Fantastical’s Ease of Use

Fantastical is king at capturing events and tasks throughout the day via its natural language parsing field. Simply typing task Pick up car from oil change at 3:00PM [15m] will create a 15-minute time blocked task at 3:00PM to pick up the car from the oil change. This is ideal for capturing new tasks and events throughout the day.

However, there aren’t any specific time tracking features baked into Fantastical at this point. Jumping in and out of the app is pretty easy and you can check off tasks in any calendar view or the Tasks list view in the left sidebar. If you want to be more specific about how long it took you to complete the task, you can change the “[15m]” moniker in the title of the task to the amount of time it actually took you. You won’t be able to review the difference between your planned duration and your actual duration this way, but it certainly helps in the review stage of your time blocked day.

Review

Finally, the review stage. What good is all this planning if you can’t go back, review, and learn from your mistakes? Reviewing each time blocked day can be important in different ways — you can review to ensure you don’t miss any billable time, you can review to determine if your expectations aren’t matched with reality, and you can review to provide a jumpstart to your next day’s plans. No matter the reason, review is fundamental to good time blocking.

Sunsama’s Built-In Review Process

Sunsama’s review process isn’t as built out as its planning process, but it’s still great.

When your day is about to wrap up — which can be set to any time you want — Sunsama will allow you to work through the shutdown routine. The shutdown provides analytics, breaking down how much time you spent working on work and personal tasks and which tasks you completed. There’s also an opportunity to write out your thoughts on the day and post those thoughts to Slack.

More than anything though, the shutdown routine in Sunsama triggers and somewhat forces you to step back from your computer. When it’s time to be done for the day, Sunsama can force you to be done for the day. If you’re aiming for a better work-life balance, Sunsama is certainly trying to do its part.

You can read more about Sunsama’s startup and shutdown processes in our article right here.

Fantastical’s Review Process

Just like the prior two stages, Fantastical doesn’t have a specific shutdown or review process. You can, however, ensure you have a shutdown routine through a few more manual ways.

First, I tend to create blocks at the beginning of my day labelled “Wake, prep, and arrive” and at the end of my day titled “Shutdown”. Both of these can be very easily created using a shortcut in the Shortcuts app, which you can trigger from anywhere in iOS or macOS. Once created, you have your day’s start and end times. This shutdown time block ensures you have the time you need to review your day and move into the next one.

Second, if you change the number of minutes for each planned task to the number of minutes for actual time taken to complete the task, you can review your day pretty easily in either of Fantastical’s Day or Week views. To view completed tasks, you’ll have to jump into the View menu and select Show Completed Tasks. Otherwise, completed tasks will disappear off your calendar. If you change that duration when you finish a task, you should be able to quickly tell where your daily plan went awry.

Wrap Up

Can you tell? Indeed, Sunsama is built for time blocking. In each of the above three steps, Sunsama has a feature or workflow to work through each day. Fantastical’s time blocking features are quite new, meaning any time blocking routines you want to use inside Fantastical will be more manual by nature.

And this is fine — some folks may find Sunsama’s built-in routines to be too stringent and structured. You may find Sunsama to be too granular — each individual email and individual task has to be added to your calendar, creating the potential for a calendar littered with short events throughout the day and constant need to interact with Sunsama as you work through your task list. Some folks may prefer the generalities and manualness Fantastical provides in these regards.

Or, planners will be planners — some folks will adore the top-to-bottom planned approach Sunsama provides.

You do ultimately pay for the specific Sunsama routines. There’s a price difference between these two apps, to be sure. For those who have endless buckets of tasks, Sunsama’s monthly cost will be a bargain. For those who either have better control of their buckets or want a more general approach to time blocking, Fantastical’s cost may be easier to stomach.

Hopefully the above breakdown provides two options on opposite ends of the time blocking spectrum to help build out your daily calendar.

Stress Testing Your Productivity System: Three Tips for When Your Productivity System Fails You

There are two very distinct periods to my year: tax season and not-tax season. The not-tax-season season continues to get more busy, but there’s still quite a drop off from the prior high-stress period of the year. With each passing deadline between April 30th, June 15th, and June 30th, the demands of the season progressively subside.

Like most people, I tend to revisit my systems during the less stressful periods of the year. Creativity returns over the summer, system failures are addressed, and new habits are adopted. Coincidentally, nearly all my annual app subscriptions renew between August and October of each year.

On the other hand, the veil of less intensity hangs over the non-tax-season season. This often tricks me into thinking I can do more during my busy seasons than I actually can.

Sunsama and Obsidian were perfect examples of this.

Last October, I began a simple bullet journaling habit inside Obsidian with the hopes of developing a small knowledge archive that could be used by students or other young accountants in the office. I intended on logging general steps to the solutions I developed each day — either via voice dictation and AI summaries or via direct SOP-creation — and ensuring the notes were all searchable inside my own Obsidian bank and the office-wide Notion database.

That habit made it to mid-January — I encountered more problems each day than I expected back in less-intense October, and the Obsidian habit died.

Sunsama lasted a lot longer than Obsidian. In fact, Sunsama may return, though with a different approach during the most stressful seasons of the year.

Here are three things I found myself adopting during the busiest season of my year to ensure my productivity system still worked for me each day.

First, the Problem

Sunsama was the bread and butter to my productivity system during tax season this year. I jumped into Sunsama every morning and planned out each day. I’d generally check off items throughout the day with the amount of time each task took to complete, and I’d generally review each day’s success late in the evening or the next morning.

Where Sunsama broke down for me was in its granularity. For instance:

• Each tax return to complete was a Notion item in an office-wide database. Each of these returns showed up in Sunsama’s Notion inbox and were required to be dragged into my time-boxed day. I can complete between 20 and 40 returns in any given day.
• Each email in Gmail or Outlook can be dragged into my time-boxed day. During the busy season, I tend to send 30-40 emails (more after I adopted Loom), and 50 or so would flood in each day.
• Each non-tax-return related task — of which there are still plenty — had to be captured somewhere (I opted for Todoist for this tax season). Each of these would have to be captured then added to my time-boxed day in Sunsama.

Each tax return I wanted to complete, each email I wanted to answer, and each ordinary task I wanted to work on amounted to a mountain of work I could barely keep track of. While Sunsama did a great job of tracking everything, the breakdown came in the planning process. I would ultimately spend 30+ minutes in the morning clicking and dragging each email/task/tax return into my time-boxed day.

I could probably complete 2 or 3 tax returns in that 30 minutes if I focused. And I dreaded the mental overhead in that 30-minute span.

My treasured Sunsama planning process quickly found its way to pasture.

I had to come up with a new solution to track all my work and ensure I found focused moments throughout each day.

Solution #1: Simplify into Time Zones

My first step to fixing my stressed out productivity system was to break down everything I needed to do each day into four or five general categories. The five main categories became:

1. Admin
2. Email
3. Tax
4. Non-Tax
5. Personal

These five blocks became the core of my work days. And by and large, each work day became very routinized and structured.

• Personal blocks were applied to my morning routine, lunch, family time, and post-evening work periods.
• Email blocks were applied to the first 30-60 minutes of each work day.
• Tax blocks were applied to the best chunks of my day, specifically between 10:00AM and 12:00PM, 3:00PM and 5:00PM, and 8:00PM and 10:00PM.
• Non-tax blocks made up any unused high-focus time, or if there was an emergency on my plate.
• Admin time became pure filler.

Once it was email time, rather than pore through my Sunsama list to view all the emails I wanted to answer, I would instead just jump straight into my email inbox and hammer out as many replies as I could in the time allotted.

Once it was tax time, instead of jumping into my pre-planned set of work for the day, I’d either jump into our office-wide Notion and pick the most urgent tax work to complete, or I’d walk straight into our file room and just pick a random name to begin work.

I hated admin time, so I avoided it at all costs.

And when it was finally personal time, I dropped everything I was doing and headed straight into personal time.

In summary then, instead of having my actual tasks in my calendar — the method which was so great for me in my non-tax-season season — I created blocks or zones of time where I would focus on one general category of tasks instead. Flying at 30,000 feet, you could say I stepped back and summarized my day into zones rather than planned out what I’d work on each day.

Solution #2: Avoid the Productivity System at all Costs

It became apparent that I could easily fall into a trap of thinking I was productive each day by checking off dozens of tax tasks, non-tax tasks, and emails as I worked through them. I think this was somewhat of an illusion though — in reality, I jumped in and out of Sunsama at least 30 times a day to see what was next on the list, which ultimately led to less focus time, more distraction, and a higher probability of getting out of my chair and grabbing a cup of coffee.

The solution was to avoid my productivity system altogether save for three important times of the day:

1. Planning my day into the time zones described above.
2. Capturing tasks inside a capture system of some sort (I used Todoist this past tax season).
3. Reviewing and checking off items at the end of the day.

Each day, I found myself operating more by memory than by direction. When planning, I’d pick the absolute imperatives for the day — file this return, send that email, finish that piece of admin — and ensure those were done first thing within each of the appropriate time zones. After the imperatives were done, I’d just continue onto the next thing I saw in that particular silo:

• When working on tax tasks, I’d often jump back into Notion and see what was next on the list.
• When working on administrative tasks, I’d either jump back into Notion to see what hadn’t been completed yet or I would talk to someone in the office to see what needed to be done next.

And of course, when enough was enough…

Solution #3: Schedule Personal, Family, and Free Time

I would jump into the next personal, family or free time block whenever my brain hit a wall.

As time wore on during tax season, I found it absolutely fundamental to stop everything I was doing on the spot when a personal or family time block rolled through my schedule. It didn’t matter how close I was to finishing a return or how much more work pumped through the email inbox, when it was time to slow down, it was time to slow down.

There were two main things I found both surprising and awesome about scheduling free time into the schedule:

• Say, if someone called into the office to set up an appointment, I or my colleagues could look at my calendar and simply state I had an appointment. It didn’t matter if that appointment was with my family or was me simply doom-scrolling the internet to turn my brain off for a few minutes — there was something in the schedule already blocked out for doing this sort of task.
• Clients were very, very understanding of personal time. I almost wonder if this is a new thing (or, perhaps more likely, we have excellent clients). But not once did a client scoff or seemingly get frustrated if I stated I “had already scheduled a date with my girls at home.” People seem to be more and more understanding of the requirement for personal time, and it seemed best to admit when I had personal time scheduled rather than work time.

There are two other little things I did during the most intense part of the season to ensure I always had some personal time scheduled:

1. I somewhat instituted a “24-hour rule” for new appointments or time blocks. In short, when the going got tough, my next 24 hours were assumed to be totally blocked and the soonest I’d meet with anyone was 24 hours into the future. This gave me time to schedule personal time into the calendar even if the work kept flooding in.
2. If I happened to have a block of time that was empty, I generally assumed that empty block was personal time. If, for whatever reason, the empty time block happened during one of my zones of focus, I might just find the next thing to work on. But by and large, empty time zones meant personal time — work was scheduled deliberately and worked on deliberately while personal time had no barriers.

Wrap Up

I greatly appreciated the chance to stress test my productivity system this last six months or so. I learned a few important lessons about myself:

1. I’m imaginative in the less intensive part of the year and I imagine myself doing more than I’m capable of in the intense part of the year.
2. When push came to shove, having a very basic, skeleton plan for each day was more important than being very detailed in my planning.
3. Planning a workday has diminishing returns. Three simple minutes of barebones day-structuring could save me an hour of back-and-forth time throughout the day, while 15 minutes of planning may only save an 1.5 hours. I can overplan a day.
4. Defaulting to personal time when I felt spent or I had completed a time zone ensured I had no sun-up-to-sun-down days. My days may have gotten long, but I was always able to get home for supper and to put the girls down for bed.

I’m sure the coming months will result in a bunch of imaginative workflow brainstorming and will result in a more convoluted planning workflow than I’m capable of implementing. It seems to be the annual cycle. But each year that goes by, past stress tests of my productivity systems have moulded my workflows piece by piece into something that works great for me.

How to Startup and Shutdown Your Day with Sunsama

Way, way back when, Shawn showed off one of his cool tricks for spurring the creative juices each morning. Rather than sitting down cold turkey at the computer to begin work for the day, Shawn would leave a note right in front of his keyboard the prior evening outlining the next step, the next idea, or the next topic to write. Rather than sitting down to chaos, the note provided a clear path forward for Shawn.

This was my first introduction to a “startup” routine.

Honestly, the introduction didn’t root — I only developed a startup routine about five or six months ago.

I had no idea what I was missing. Since adopting my own startup routine, I’ve never felt so in control. I wake up in the morning with a new shot of confidence and a spurt of energy because I know what’s coming. I know what I’m in for. Less reaction. More action.

I can point the rooting of this startup routine to the discovery of Sunsama. Sunsama has done a number of things for my life in recent months. The app has rooted this startup routine and is developing a shutdown routine. The app helps me come to grips with an immense workload and an acceptance of my limits each day. The app helps track my time, carve out moments of personal time, and ensure my actions are aligned with my objectives each week. Sunsama has quickly become one of the most fundamental apps in my workflow.

This startup routine, though? It’s this startup routine in Sunsama which has altered how I work.

Sunsama’s Built-In Startup Routine

Each morning, Sunsama presents you with the chance to plan out your day. The planning process takes no more than 10 minutes and has 3 or 4 steps, which I’ll use my own terms to describe:

1. ”The Dump”: Wherein Sunsama prompts you to add in all the things you’d like to do in the upcoming day. This means everything — you can drag in tasks from Notion, Clickup, or Trello, emails from Outlook or Gmail, or Slack messages. You can import already scheduled events from your calendar. You can add individual tasks to your daily list. “The Dump” means you dump anything and everything into your potential plan for the day.
2. “Guesstimate”: Wherein you put a little effort into your plan in order for Sunsama to really perform its magic. You need to mould your dumped tasks in two ways: first as a category and second as the estimated time to complete the task. First, you need to set the task as a work task or a personal task. You can break down work tasks into sub-categories, but you can leave things as simple as “Work” and “Personal”. Once categorized, you use Sunsama’s per-task dropdown menu to choose how long you want to work on that task during the day.
   
3. “Defer”: Wherein Sunsama helps you refine your day. Assuming you’ve properly categorized and guesstimated the amount of time it’ll take to complete all the tasks on your list, Sunsama will notify you whether you have too much work on your plate. I regularly begin each day with 16 hours of work, only to dial it back to a more consumable 8 or 9 hours of work (it’s currently tax season; this number is more like 6 hours during non-tax season periods of the year). As you defer the lesser important tasks to the next day, Sunsama’s work clock drops and hits a comfortable yellow colour when you’ve reached a sustainable level of work for the day.
4. ”Schedule”: Wherein you put what you’re going to do each day into your calendar. In theory, you could stop in the “Defer” step when Sunsama’s work clock drops down to a sustainable level of work. But it’s best if you take those important timed tasks and piece together a healthy working day. Sunsama has some auto-scheduling features to help build your daily calendar — you can simply hover over the task and hit “X” on your keyboard to auto-schedule the task in your calendar. Once scheduled, that task will live as a time-block for the day.

Off the top, I noted Sunsama presents you with this planning process first thing in the morning. However, you can pre-plan a day the night before if you’d like. There’s something quite magical about planning your day the night before — you can go to bed with a ton of confidence knowing you have the next day completely under control.

How I Structure My Day Using Sunsama’s Startup Routine

This will be one of the more subjective areas of any startup routine. Here’s how I tend to structure my day.

First, context: I have two or three goals in mind for each day:

1. I always strive to answer my messages, voicemail, email inbox, Slack, and Notion inbox at least once every 24 hours. I like to leave a little margin in my day to allow for additional inbox answering, but I have to have at least once a day where I address these messages.
2. I always strive for 6 hours of focused (in my world, this means “billable”) time each day.
3. I always strive to place my focused hours in the time of the day when I know I work best. I’m at my best in the later morning, later afternoon, and later evening.

With those goals in mind, I generally group all my messaging and administrative tasks first thing in the morning. These sorts of tasks usually take the least amount of brain power, so they hit a time of day where my brain isn’t at its peak performance.

The six hours of billable time is broken apart between each of my best focus times of day: the later morning, later afternoon, and later evening. Sometimes I’ll use that first block of focused time to prepare for the second block. Sometimes I use the last focused block of my day to prepare for the next day’s first focus block. However it ends up being structured, my most important work falls into these three time blocks.

Finally, I always add my personal time into the calendar first before building out the rest of my day in Sunsama. “Wake, prep, and arrive” gives me some time to wakeup, get ready for the day, and arrive at the office. This also includes early morning coffee time with colleagues at the office. “Lunch” gives me a full hour of personal time mid-day (though I never take a full hour), but this ensures I don’t book anything important during the hour and gives me a full hour to check-in with my family. And no matter what, I have a block of “Free time” added to every day — usually at the end of the day — to allow for some decompression.

This decompression time is a great time to use Sunsama’s shutdown features.

Sunsama’s Shutdown Routine

For my day, the startup routine is far more important than the shutdown routine. At least at this point. Perhaps, in the same way the startup routine took awhile to root itself, the shutdown routine will eventually become more important to me.

This isn’t to say Sunsama does a poor job handling the shutdown routine. In fact, if you use Sunsama to the full extent of its capabilities, your shutdown routine will physically force you to stop working for the day.

Depending on when you set your shutdown routine to start, Sunsama will notify you when it’s time to start winding down your day. Once wind down is done, Sunsama will provide you with a review of your day — a complete breakdown of your work hours, personal hours, all the tasks you completed in the day and the calendar events you worked through. You can use this time to align your work with your weekly objectives (more on that another day) and to ensure you achieved what you wanted to achieve in the day.

The final step in Sunsama’s shutdown routine is the opportunity to post a quick blurb to Slack. This is one of the team areas of Sunsama which I find to be arbitrary and less useful in practice. But if you do you use Sunsama as part of a team, you can notify everyone of how your day went as part of this shutdown routine.

This shutdown routine and review period takes no more than two minutes to complete (five minutes if you want to align everything with your weekly objectives) and ends with a giant “Done for the day” notifier, easing the process of closing your computer and physically shutting down for the day.

More often than not at this point in time, I find myself missing this review step. 6:00PM rolls around, I have supper with my family, I enter into another focused period later in the evening, and shutdown routine triggers at 9:00PM with no Josh in sight. As a result, I often end up reviewing the prior day right before I plan my day the next morning.

In some ways though, reviewing your day the next morning is kind of like leaving yourself “The Note” — if you provide yourself a trigger for where you left off the prior day, you may more easily figure out where you want to start your next day.

Wrap Up

I have never felt so in control of my day as I do when I use Sunsama’s startup routine. When Sunsama was still new in my life, I often chose to plan my next day in the evening prior, which led to a sense of calm when I went to bed that I had never experienced before. It was fascinating — in a way, I felt like Superman, such that there was nothing the coming day could throw at me that I couldn’t handle.

Time has worn on and that startup routine has shifted to the earlier morning, if only because I find myself working later into the evening. The last thing I want to do right now at the end of the day is to think about more work the next day.

But it’s this startup routine which ensures I have structure in each day, ensures I meet or exceed my billable goal targets for each day, and ensures I stay up to date with colleagues and clients at least once a day.

Perhaps it’s because my life and work is more consistent now than it was when Shawn wrote “The Note” in 2015, or perhaps I’m just now a new man (!), but I’m grateful this startup routine in Sunsama has taken root as seamlessly as it has these last few months.