Sunsama

Best calendar app, worth the premium - it’s pricey but the calendar and with all the apps coming in from med schools for the first round and everything is overwhelming and Sunsama has kept me sane. Worth the money, not cheap, but the team is responsive and I appreciate their responses on my feedback

Sunsama is great at planning the day and splitting it in the task-shaped chunks to make sure you don't overextend your time and have a realistic view of the time you have available. It has some nice (but optional) features like day planning and summarization, goal tracking and archiving/backlogging the tasks that got stale in your task-list, and in general Sunsama has a great tone of voice all around the UI — friendly and non-judgemental, making the routine seem organic and almost transparent.

It's pretty expensive compared to some alternatives, but still worth it if you can stick to it and follow the routine diligently.

I paid for it several times, starting/stopping subscription when I switched tools, but I still keep returning to it due to its great approach to timeblocking and allowing to stack tasks for the day/week, integrate with my calendars (both Outlook and Google), and having a great view of the day. I could do most of it in calendar itself along with notion/evernote, tana etc., but that would take much more time and wouldn't be as pleasant and effective.

I'd offer at least to try it for a month — it's 20 bucks and you can turn off recurrence. While not cheap, you will be able to understand whether that makes a difference in your workflow and productivity. It might be good enough to pay for a year and go through the hassle of charging the expense to your company or a client — after all, it's productivity tool, for you and/or your team (if you have one).

Thick heads need to check out the Sunsama site. Then they would know that Sunsama works with Outlook calendar. If you are a Mac person, you can sync Outlook calendar with iCloud and still use Sunsama. Don't be a hater who just upvotes bad reviews without checking out the facts.

I use Sunsama to track how much time I am spending on the various roles/responsibilities of my job. If one area is taking too much time, I re-evaluate what is happening in the workplace. Why are things unbalanced?

I link all tasks to my overarching objectives. If a task doesn't relate to one of those objectives, should I really take it on? Probably not because it will not get me to the goals I want. We should ask this question of every task before we take it on.

Time tracking, daily reports on where I put my energy and the ability to be compatible with Outlook are great options. Daily and weekly planning is built in. Every dime I have spent on Sunsama has been worth it.

And remember - everyone has your data. If you are going to hate on Google, you might as well hate on the others as well. Be an equal opportunity conspiracy theorist.