The Meditations Newsletter
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A weekly Sunsama newsletter to help you work a little bit better. |
💬 Jessica asks:
I'm a doctor working in a public hospital. I began using Sunsama to help keep my workload manageable and find balance in my daily life. My to do list and administration tasks can seem low priority compared to the clinical work - and I find they easily pile up and can become overwhelming.
The main issue I'm encountering at the moment is my day is fully occupied with "meetings". My roster consists of morning handover meetings, teaching and being allocated to an operating theatre or a clinic. We do not have rostered time for nonclinical work or admin. This means any admin tasks (responding to emails, completing paperwork, ordering gear for operating lists, study to prepare for surgery, creating teaching presentations) falls within my break or outside of rostered work hours. It is rare to find myself with an actual 30 minute uninterrupted work free lunch break, and I often take work home.
I do not find this sustainable, or enjoy having work intrude on my life like this (I am often exhausted at the end of the day or week) - but unfortunately it is fairly acceptable in our profession. I try to have a rolling Work Admin task (with many smaller subtasks) to time bracket this. I constantly add to this, meaning the Work Admin task is never actually closed/complete which can feel futile and unsatisfying. I regularly braindump tasks into my list in between seeing patients - but find there is nowhere to schedule the tasks on my calendar in my daily/weekly planning sessions. I'm wondering if you or other users have suggestions for how to manage work when we have little control about how/where out time is allocated at work?
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🎙️ Ashutosh's response:
This is a tough situation because you are running into the physical limitations of time and it looks like you’ve fully allocated it. Usually, I’d recommend all sort of alterations to when you do work, or moving meetings, or asking for a no meeting day. My sense, from my outsider’s understanding of the medical system, is that you really can not control your schedule in a way that would make any of that feasible. It won’t solve the problem but it may relieve some of the anxiety and stress to simply acknowledge you are trying to do something impossible and free yourself of feeling like you’ve got to do it all.
If I were in your situation, my next steps would be the following.
First, I’d acknowledge how insane and impossible what you are being asked to do and asking of yourself is.
Next, I’d try and decide which of those categories of non-clinic work matter to you or have to be done. For example, if bad things happen if you don’t do that paperwork, I’d do that and just give up on professional development work (sad but something has to give). I can’t know what must be done.
Next, I’d look into what could be offloaded to someone else. Can you hire an EA to help with the emails and ordering supplies?
And finally, a drastic measure, can you use your PTO to take days off to catch up on non-essential work. That’s obviously a super sad and dark way to use PTO but if you really want to get it all done, you’ll need to find time from somewhere.
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💡 Pro-tip refresher: managing your tasks ahead of vacation, plus Sunny technique
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Recycling this previous pro-tip video as a refresher!
Heading out of office? This refresher covers a few ways to make sure your tasks don't pile up while you're away, from doing nothing at all (really!) to moving things around ahead of time. Plus, our AI assistant Sunny can now clear out your vacation days for you in a single request, and every change it makes can be undone right from the chat.
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Digestible, quick-hitting blogs packed with tips to improve your workdays. |
How to Reclaim a Day That's Nothing But Meetings
On a packed day, you usually can't get rid of the meetings themselves. What costs you is everything they leave behind: follow-ups you forget and attention split between calls.
This piece gives four tactics for getting something real out of a meeting-heavy day: pick your one non-meeting priority before the first call, capture follow-ups the moment each meeting ends, protect
your one real gap, and reset your attention in the 90 seconds between calls.
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🗣️ Watercooler Highlights
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Insights and tips from the Sunsama Slack community |
• @Mike O. discovered that pairing Google Astra with Sunsama creates a powerful AI-human workflow: Astra manages the backlog and builds 25-minute pomodoro-like work blocks, while Sunsama handles the human execution layer — thread here
• @Devin Green announced the Sunsama Raycast Extension is now live on the Raycast store, powered entirely by Sunsama's MCP Server with no separate AI model required — thread here
• @Travis Meyer shared that Autoplan just got a major upgrade: you can now refine your plan by chatting with Sunny after she builds it, teach her rules for how you like to plan your day, and she runs on a smarter model, so it's worth another try if you weren't impressed before — thread here
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Ways to get more out of Sunsama
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👋 Join the Community
Step into our private Slack space—your mindful-productivity club—to swap tips, find accountability partners, and catch live Flow Sessions. Jump in! 🎁 Spread the Calm
Forward this newsletter to a friend who could use less chaos and more clarity. If you’re on a free trial and you let us know that you’ve shared this with a friend, and they start their own free trial, we’ll extend your free trial by two weeks! |
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Work less, achieve more. The way of Sunsama. |
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