Productivity tools need to be nearly infinitely flexible and adaptable. What does it mean to be productive, anyway? The heart of the problem is one that each user has to ultimately answer for themselves.
Fed up with rigid traditional productivity tools, I designed an unopinionated productivity app that could answer this question for anyone, centered around a new paradigm unlocked by combining your data with AI: Ambient Intelligence.
Using this new paradigm enabled with AI, we can avoid the two pitfalls of most all productivity software: overcomplication and rigidness.
Ambient Intelligence: A Proposal
The amount of information your productivity tools store about you is staggering. An outsider looking at your calendar or to-do list could probably deduce what your occupation is, what people are important to you, and the things you enjoy doing. Yet, all this information is processed passively. It's all treated the same.
There's a good reason for this: diversity. These platforms need to be able to cover a ridiculously wide range of use cases. Take the simple calendar event, for example. It could be anything from a doctor appointment to a concert. For timekeeping, this is totally fine. But when the problem space is improving your time management and productivity, things start breaking down.
More niche productivity tools—see Motion, Amie, and Todoist—try to tackle this by adding more features. Sure, this is a logical response to a lack of depth. But it comes at the cost of increasing learning curves. When you're spending time learning how to use your productivity software, there's something that's gone very wrong.
Let's go back to the subject of the data you provide these apps. Years ago, it would take a good amount of human intelligence to figure out your habits, tendencies, and places where you could improve. But with the accessibility of AI, this task has become really cheap, and we can do it really effectively. And with this understanding, we can automate away a lot of these complex features and friction points with productivity software as a whole.
Sundial embodies this belief, taking a fundamentally different approach to how you interface with your calendar events, to-dos, and notes.
With enough usage, the app itself understands your priorities, becoming an assistant as much as it is a source of truth.
With Ambient Intelligence in mind, I developed a lightweight productivity app that's both incredibly easy to learn yet incredibly capable.
Blocks
I took the Notion concept of “blocks,” adapting it to a task and time-management use case. With Sundial, every day is a list of blocks.
Additions to the day will be a list item by default. Add other blocks using natural language. A simple “wash dishes, 15 min” can be interpreted as a to-do item—“wash dishes”—combined with a timer, 15 minutes long. For more specific control, you can also create and use a Markdown-like syntax to create new blocks more reliably.
Travel time is where it gets a bit more nuanced. The app can memorize locations (like “home,” “work,” and “school”) and use them to calculate travel distances and times. You can also just input addresses or map links, and it will be converted into travel time.
With an open API, it's possible to create your own blocks for all integrations. Zoom, Gmail, and Google Meet are common ones I decided to implement here.
Blocks elegantly combine a to-do list and calendar, maintaining rich integrations while keeping the interface free of clutter.
The Island
Ambient Intelligence is accessible through The Island—a simple chat window that expands when needed.
For more complex tasks, it comes in handy: scheduling ambiguous events and tasks, planning out larger-scale projects, and optimizing a busy day.
With the help of your data, The Island is active—providing suggestions and quick actions in response to completing certain tasks, running late, and much more, completely unprompted. Over time, a user's personal AI assistant becomes able to understand their time management better than they do, letting them know if they tend to procrastinate certain tasks and proactively helping solve the problem of time efficiency.
