Work has changed. You are not alone.
Work has changed. You are not alone.
- Product
- Sunsama
- Sent from
- sunsama.com
- Sent
No dark-mode styles — this email renders the same in a dark client.
************************************ Work has changed. You are not alone. ************************************ Earlier this week, I sent an email titled “Work has changed. Sunsama must too.” and responses flooded in from folks saying they’re relieved to see words put to how they’ve been feeling. I get the sense that many of us are feeling lonely as the way we work changes. I wanted to share a roundup of responses so you can move through this transition knowing you are not alone. There was one line in the email that many of you quoted in your responses: "I used to lose myself inside the work I was doing. Now I lose myself amongst all the work I am doing." We’re now working at a higher level of abstraction and the sense of speed is palpable, exhilarating, and unnerving. Even the most technically adept individual contributors find themselves working more like managers. What seems particularly hard is that we’re not truly managers who simply delegate work. We are intimately involved in all the details and the end product. All at once, we’re learning a new tool that makes us feel a little more scatterbrained while also navigating an unrequested career transition to being architects, directors, and managers. Here’s what you all said about this: "I'm working twice as fast without feeling twice as calm." — a software engineering student "More output has meant more tasks, which has led to more mental overwhelm, and honestly, some deeper philosophical questions about purpose. It's harder to know whether I'm doing meaningful work or just doing more of it." — a nonprofit leader "Recalibrating to know what 'enough work for today' looks like has been challenging. That used to be physical fatigue in the industrial era. Then in the knowledge era, it sort of de facto became the level of stress, and now between the ease of execution with AI but the deluge of MORE tasks, that's been a hard nut to crack." — a reader "I'm still working so many hours I'm exhausted […] I am doing a lot of work in parallel these days and getting lost in what I'm doing (but productive? it's confusing)." — a recently retired tech worker ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ***************************** Everyone is duct-taping a fix ***************************** Internally, we had a sense that living amongst your chat threads feels chaotic but that was a hunch for us. The responses to the email made this crystal clear. Everyone is duct-taping a fix to try and connect all their AI threads back to their actual list of deliverables for the day. "I have been, inadvertently, spending so much of my workdays trying to replicate, within Claude […] the exact experience you're describing. […] But they're brittle." "I've been building up a way to transition from Sunsama to Notion so that I can converse with agents on my tasks and better track what I've assigned to agents vs do myself." "My workflow through the day is often 'go to meeting, get Claude Code to read the transcript, do the things', and the gap is that if the 'things' aren't immediately doable (or I get distracted by one of the 5 parallel threads I have going on), stuff gets dropped." "Claude/Codex can set up to 100 tasks to be executed and I need to review the final product once it is ready for my attention or once there is a blocker." — a solutions architect running 17 agents This is exactly what we're building Agent Delegation for: one Sunsama task that holds all the threads of work you've handed to Claude, Codex, et al. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We’ve been overwhelmed by responses to the email asking for access to this. If you’d like access to Agentic Delegation, please fill out this short request form ( https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf_O5mBjSsWwb9zBtEjraHuf3f3ynEo519XGp_ht4jHbqTYag/viewform?usp=publish-editor ). If we’ve already responded to you, you are good. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *************************** Parallelism is a real thing *************************** If there’s any product community out there that’s into single-track deep work, it’s the Sunsama community. But even in this community, working on things in parallel seems inevitable for parts of our days. Here’s what you said: "Parallel work is also something I hated […] But I have no choice […] the tab where Claude is working away at the parallel task gets forgotten about as new urgencies arise. […] the parallel task feature is truly a godsend." "Honestly this is why I left Sunsama. Cause I felt these things were missing. I'm coming back as soon as they're up." One reader also pointed out that even the AI struggles with it: "It takes some cajoling to make it plan for parallel tasks, and then it still scolds you for doing too much work in parallel." This felt so pressing that we’ve already moved “parallel tasks ( https://roadmap.sunsama.com/changelog/parallel-tasks )” out of beta and made it available to all users. We’ve also started exploring how parallel timers ( https://roadmap.sunsama.com/changelog/parallel-timers-track-time-on-more-than-one-task-at-once ) work for folks who work on things in parallel. This is also live for everyone. We’re working through how this should feel in real time with everyone using it, so write back with how it feels for you. For those of you not working on things in parallel, task timing and focus work exactly the same and always will. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ******************************* And not everyone feels this way ******************************* It’s not all just tokenmaxxing, though. A small percentage of responses included thoughtful and substantive pushback that Sunsama’s lost its way and is now just catering to people with agent derangement syndrome. There were also real feelings of anger, frustration, and disillusionment: "I often hear my tech friends assume that this big shift happened to all knowledge workers, but for those of us outside that world, it hasn't really changed much. […] please don't leave the rest of us behind!" — a nonprofit worker "The friction is kind of the point. […] it's not the plan itself, but the process of using my brain to create the plan that gives me the most benefit." — a software engineer who plans by hand on purpose “I'm one of those people who have to deal with the consequences of the deluge of crappy LLM output (text, code, images) by people persuaded that they have the secret to quality slop while everyone else just "doesn't prompt well enough". It's all crap, unreadable, unmaintainable, untrustworthy.” — a scientist I get where a lot of users are coming from. Given what we’ve seen in AI products out there, it’s reasonable to initially assume that “this product now has AI in it, so it will certainly atrophy my critical thinking and ability to be intentional.” I don’t think that has to be the story of how AI gets integrated into our tools, but sadly, it is the default. There’s an optimistic vision I wish people would give a chance: motivated, caring product designers can fight fire with fire, using the same technologies we fear to build tools that help protect and nurture our critical thinking and intentionality. For the new planning ritual, we’ve felt a responsibility to integrate AI in ways that help you spend less effort on low-leverage tasks and save the productive friction for the highest-leverage thinking. After months of beta testing, we really believe the new planning ritual makes it easier to be intentional with your day. And so we've put our name behind it. In particular, I find that I am better able to express what I think is important when I'm presented with a place to write, in prose, what I want my day to be like. In the past, starting the day seeing a list of tasks would hijack my attention to start focusing on what's already there even if it was stale or not truly aligned with my intentions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ************** Keep it coming ************** It’s been a joy to talk to all of you this week over hundreds of emails. Thank you to everyone who wrote in, whether to share enthusiasm or offer a measured repudiation. If there’s more you want to discuss, just write back, I read and respond to all of these personally. - Ashutosh ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start planning your day → ( https://sunsama.com/ ) Twitter ( https://twitter.com/sunsamaHQ ) Instagram ( https://www.instagram.com/sunsamahq ) LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/sunsama ) Read this email in your browser or share it with friends! ( https://track.customer.io/deliveries/dgTxigYDAI7OtQKNzrUCAaHWiBwaXURsCFIU5u_EmQ== ) If you don't want the newsletter, unsubscribe here ( https://api.sunsama.com/drip/unsubscribe-newsletter?email=b-sunsama-lgmrsb%40mail.newslettersearchengine.com&sig=9a3ce96ceb32823ff9692d84528d74050b182df3757707b0899160830d4c02f4 ).
- Accession
- nse/sunsama/2026-11-13/6908
- From
- Ashutosh Priyadarshy · ashutosh@sunsama.com
- Sent
- 13 November 2026 · 20:00 UTC
