Daily Highlights are automatically drafted daily summaries of the work you did in a given day that can easily be shared with colleagues or filed away for your records.
Sunsama is able to write an initial draft of your end-of-day summary by looking at the work you did in other tools. All you need to do is connect the tools you use everyday at work, like your project management tool, calendar, email, etc. Sunsama then creates a first draft for you. You can publish that summary and share it with your teammates, or you can hop in and make some quick edits and personalizations before sending it off.
Origins
At Sunsama, we've been working remote and async for years now. We’ve put a lot of effort into being thoughtful and intentional about how we communicate as a team. One of the things we implemented early-on was sharing our progress in our “Daily shutdowns”. At the end of the day, we’d post a little message in Slack with a summary of what we got done, links back to important resources, a short demo video when possible, and a sentence or so about how we felt that day. Even though we were thousands of miles apart from our colleagues, this helped us create a sense of shared momentum day in and day out. More than any other ritual, routine, or workflow we have at Sunsama, these daily updates are a team favorite and probably our most important communication norm. Writing these daily updates is hard work. At the end of the workday, your brain is mush, you’ve forgotten what you've done, and your probably rushing to finish up to make it to dinner or whatever evening plans you’ve got.
We knew how valuable it is to create this kind of end-of-day artifact whether you want to share it with your team or use it for your own record keeping and we also knew that the main reason people don't write these artifacts at the end of the day is because it's just too much effort at a time when you are depleted.
We wanted to make it 10x easier for anybody to write a thoughtful and impressive summary of their workday with minimal effort. Daily Highlights are a superpowered version of this ritual we've been doing for years. Instead of doing all the hard work of writing an end-of-day summary, we've asked software to automate much of the legwork in writing a complete, thoughtful, and visually impressive summary of our workday.
Replay your day, quickly
In the past, when I used to manually write my end-of-day summary on a blank canvas, my process looked something like this:
- I'd open up my list of completed Sunsama tasks for the day.
- I'd open up GitHub and other tools I used to find links to work in those tools.
- I’d cycle through the tabs, copying over URLs, and jogging my memory about work I did earlier that day that I’d already documented in those tools.
Sunsama now does this part automatically.
It goes through all of the tools I have integrated, looking for things that I did in those tools and trying to figure out what was most important. For each of those activities, Sunsama is able to write a short 1-2 sentence summary of my contribution to that bit of work for the day and add it to my draft. Instead of opening a ton of tabs, I can skim through what I did, and just give a quick thumbs up or thumbs down to which bits of work I want to include in my end-of-day summary.
Save your writing energy for the good stuff
In the past, I spent a lot of time trying re-reading and re-writing things I already wrote so I could write a good end of day summary. The current state of the art in AI and LLMs is already very capable of summarizing content that exists elsewhere. Instead of re-reading things that I've already written and trying to re-summarize that, I let Sunsama take care of that. I let the AI take care of the nitty gritty details and I can focus my writing energy on communicating more of the nuance and emotional context about the day.
Write a daily highlight even on your busiest days
Writing high-quality updates is really hard, so we wanted to make sure that you got an update for every single day by default, even if you did nothing at all. If you have any activity in any of your tools on a given day, Sunsama will draft a daily wrap for you and have it ready for your review. If you don't have time to review it today, that's okay. You can always review past drafts, edit them, and publish them when the time is right for you.
Publish something you can feel proud of
We also wanted your Daily Highlights to be an artifact you'd be really proud of and excited to share with your colleagues or your future self when you need to look back on a week or a month to understand what you got done. Regardless of whether you choose to share your daily wrap over Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, or just keep it in your daily journal, your daily wrap should be something that represents you well.
Wrapping up
With our workday being mostly digital, we don’t have the same physical routines that signal the transition away from work. When you create your Daily Highlights you make sure your workday ends with a feeling of clarity and accomplishment instead of in a digital daze. Sunsama’s daily summaries transform the chore into a rewarding habit.
You can roll into the end of your day tired and ready to go home and know that Sunsama will be there to help you make sense of everything that just happened.
