Jam Mayer

Samuel Pierre-Gilles

Resources

Sunsama

Reclaim AI

Sam Pierre-Gilles

What my experience was with the platform was really feeling like the blinders were almost on. So on a day to day basis, I would have some tasks that at the start of the day, I knew these are my top three things I wanna get done today. And I didn't feel like Sunsama was the best for me to stay aligned to those three things in the day because once competing priorities started to happen, I didn't feel like I had the flexibility to intuitively start throwing things away and kind of rejigging my calendar on the fly as things were going along because it felt very focused on the scope of this is a day planner. These are the things you need to do. I am not negotiating on these things, and so not having the freedom to throw things further back is definitely a boon if you have die hard priorities. Like, this brings you a lot of what I would call cognitive load in your planning because it says, what are your absolute burning priorities that cannot be negotiated? 

Because on a 3 click, you know, honestly, I found that the flexibility to kick things off to later came back to haunt me the next day because every morning, I'd be greeted, which is part of the experience. I love the accompaniment of being notified. Hey! Welcome back to your desk. Here's the stuff you didn't do yesterday. And, you know, what are you working on today? Like, some of my company's efforts well, we were going through an acquisition, essentially. And so when you're managing parts of an acquisition, it's not something you can do without having something crop up on the fly. It's very similar. Well, I mean, it's an acquisition inside a start up, so you can tell already that, like, that's the perfect storm in terms of things changing in priorities very quickly. 

And so by jumping back and forth between, like, my Trello to scope down, what was going to happen as part of our first release post acquisition once we started remastering the content that we had we had acquired and anything else along those lines, I found that Sunsama ended up feeling more restrictive than it needed to because it couldn't bend or, like, take the curve fast enough to rapidly changing priorities. Competing priorities, it can do well, but rapidly evolving priorities, I found a little bit more difficulty in.

And I don't wanna I don't wanna tease things too early, but I'll say that in contrast, my experience with Reclaim was definitely more intuitive in that way around having to balance those priorities. Their approach is very similar but has certain nuances that I'm sure we'll get into a bit later in the episode, but that I'm personally really, really enjoying so far.

Jam Mayer

We can jump from all these tools. Definitely. I mean, Reclaim, I agree with you on that. Sunsama, really great at the time boxing. I mean, that's exactly what I used before.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

I would definitely agree to say it's a powerhouse for time boxing.

Jam Mayer

It depends on your personality. For me, it would definitely be perfect because I need those blinders. I need to go do not look at the shiny object. This is what you're going to do.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

You know, I kinda like that authoritarian angle for the, you know, for the people that it works and that's what they need. That's perfect.

Jam Mayer

Yeah.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

I'm kind of the kind of person that, like, I need to hold all the shiny marbles and actively choose to say, okay. I know all of these marbles are shiny. I'm gonna put all of them on the shelf, and the shelf is gonna stay within view while I tackle this one thing. And once this marble's processed, oh, look at that. I went a little harder than I wanted to. I have some spare time. Let's grab another one from the shelf and get started with that. And then I call the day or on the, you know, God forbid, I work on a marble and it's not resolved, then I get a little cranky, put it back on the shelf, and I pick a different one.

And so having the ability to see that shelf is something that I really liked about Reclaim because you could you know the terrible expression called there's a 1,000 ways to skin a cat. Reclaim gave me a little bit more of that polygonal view, if you will, that, like, the polyhedron view where I could look at really pure planner. So just have a look at my calendar with a couple extra layers because it was pulling in tasks from other places than my calendar. I've got my tasks kind of spread out across the week, and that was one view. But I could also look at it coming from Trello being my comfort tool. Coming from a pure Trello kind of more classic scrum kind of agile kind of mentality, I found it really nice to be able to switch to a priorities view and just completely ignore the timelines and focus exclusively on, alright. What am I looking at here? Well, the burning, this, this, and this. The very large but not burning right now, this, this, and this.

And then the low priority kinda tasks that honestly may have had their own timelines that are crunchy or not, were all kind of just split up. And so I could stop focusing about the timelines and focus on one axis at a time. And once I had somewhat order in terms of describing them and prioritising them, that's where I felt more comfortable to just say, alright. Like, AI, take the wheel. I've plugged in my constraints, optimised my schedule for me. And if anything changes, I might just move some deadlines around. And if there's anything big in terms of dramatic issues that says, like, oh, listen. I don't think you're gonna make this deadline, it would tell me.

And so was the right amount of see it, acknowledge it, push it away that that just had the right balance A bit closer to the right balance, I would say, of control versus letting go. Reclaim is kind of my vote, at least for that. But, again, I'm not a person who wants the blinders on. And so just just between us, like, our opinion on which one is better is frankly completely subjective, and that's a really cool part of it.

Jam Mayer

Yep. No. That and that's why we're doing this. I'm using both because I love me, my disorganised thoughts, and, yes, I do need those blinders. However, there are, as you said, the marbles. I have those marbles as well, and I get anxious if I don't see them as well in a way. Right? So Sunsama just goes, okay. I know you've got your marbles there, but put it in there, but we're gonna just use your blinders for X number of hours so that you can focus.

Right? However, it's great. So I've got the team in Reclaim. Right? And what I've done and what I love is I scheduled their one-on-ones. It was funny. Bear with me.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Look. I can see it. I'm seeing how these 2 actually play a little bit closer together than we think.

Jam Mayer

Yeah. So for the team, one-on-one is an example. Right? Before, we'd always because we need to be flexible as well. Yes. We do have okay, every Wednesday, we meet for 30 minutes, 1 to 2. Well, 1 to 1:30, whatever. But as you said, things just all of a sudden, the client calls, and I have to be flexible, and I have to move it manually.

So with Reclaim, it's awesome because now I've got an assistant saying, I know you're getting overwhelmed here. Alright. Let me help you here. I know you've got a one-on-one at 1 to 1:30. However, because you've added, oh, all of a sudden, client a wants to meet at 12:30, and because of the constraints, right, that you've set up in the beginning, then next thing you know, you just don't have to worry about it, and go, oh, hey. Our one-on-one was actually moved to the next day or a few hours after, and

Sam Pierre-Gilles

Exactly.

Jam Mayer

I didn't have to stress about it. So that's what I love about it.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

I might have to look into just permanently making Reclaim as part of my everyday everything. I'll admit, I haven't really checked out much in terms of integrations yet for Reclaim, but I'm definitely curious to see because getting some kind of linkage between that and Trello would be nasty. It would be absolutely nasty, like a proper bidirectional integration where you create a task in Reclaim, and you can link it back to either a checklist subitem or, you know, it creates a whole new card in Trello or something of the sort, or maybe if it's just a proper kind of one and a half way where it's pulling information from Trello into your Reclaim and asks you, like, these are assigned to you. Where do you want them in your Reclaim environment and so on and so forth? And so planning a little bit beyond living out of your calendar could really be the future of where Reclaim goes to enable a lot of work very, very quickly. I'm going to pull up my Trello right now. I'm afraid I can't share it publicly. There's some pretty sensitive stuff.

Jam Mayer

Yeah, I know.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

And so I'm gonna see if maybe I'm just the one that's a bit crazy, and there's a middle step here that I could've done. Answer is not natively. Because what I was hoping for is to look at there it is. There it is. I think I need to go shopping for a power up. Oh. Trello Jam MayerYep.

And see if I can hook up there it is. The calendar power up. Visualise Trello cards in a calendar view. Back to my point, this is one of those cases where I think what I'm looking to do between Trello and Reclaim would need essentially an integration layer so that I can get the cards that are assigned to me from Trello moved over into Reclaim because they would show up on my calendar. And so we could kind of fudge a direct Trello to Reclaim integration by having some kind of wait a minute. What am I saying? Zapier.

I need to go make some zaps. This is amazing.

Jam Mayer

Yep. Okay. Okay. Well, it's getting really exciting here now. Okay.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

Yeah. I'm already kinda spinning my wheels in a whole new direction. I'm totally sorry about that. I'm gonna write this down for later. I would say you need a bit more of, like, intentional direction to better apply itself to any given use case, and that's where people are gonna hate me for saying this. I am by no means a Microsoft purist, a controversial opinion, but I found that using Teams as a means of just mildly having my stuff together has been surprisingly good. Unexpectedly good. And so, yes, there's a calendar view in teams. No.

It's not good. We could all agree on that, and that's where Reclaim would be perfect for me. But what teams can do is keep what I would like to call sub social spaces, minor, smaller subsets of the total team you're working with, focusing on different things, whether it be post that can be addressed at whatever longer term, whatnot, or shorter term, everybody can have a chat because every everybody's death by group chat these days regardless of what platform you're messaging on.

Jam Mayer

Yeah.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

And so by the end of all of this, I see where Reclaim fits into that puzzle and fits pretty well into my workflow, and I'm really looking into how I can make this, like, more intuitively part of my everyday.

Jam Mayer

My challenge with Reclaim is when I've started, I've experimented. Okay. I'll put all my priorities and the tasks, which is great because you have to put some deadlines, how long, and you estimate how long it's gonna take you. So it does schedule, hey. Why don't you do this today? Because it does it automatically. Right? And it's great. But I honestly got more stressed, believe it or not, because, again, it could be because of ADHD tendencies, or I'm just really disorganised, or there's too many distractions. I got a little bit more stressed because when I open my calendar and it says, hey.

Jam Mayer

You said you had task 1, 2, and 3, and your deadline is such and you want me to defend it. Well, here you go. You have to do it today. And I go, wait. Hold on. I need to do task 5 instead. Right? So that's why the lack of the blinders, I should say, it's very flexible.

So I had to remove the tasks, believe it or not. My habits, though, like personal stuff, taking a walk because I really wanna make sure that I take a walk every day or lunch as an example so no one tries to schedule I'm sure you've had this before.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

I've got the best like, the best human reminder to go and have lunch.

Jam Mayer

Right.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

Because, you know, honestly, a live-in partner, fantastic. I recommend it to anyone.

Jam Mayer

We might have another episode around that, but yeah. No.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

How may I help you save my relationships?

Jam Mayer

Yes. Of course. The way I use it. So I've got my habits. Right? A bit of my priorities are habits in there. It's all set up, and I love it for meetings, by the way. I absolutely love it. So I use it right now.

It's my default. I don't have Calendly or anything like that. I actually use Reclaim. I've got my scheduling links because I set those constraints and say, here are my meeting days. It's from this time to this time and so on. Right? And so what happens is when I send out my scheduling links, it's all there, and it just adjusts automatically. If I've got a priority or a task, like a habit, for example, then it's going to say, well, do you want me to defend your habit? Yes, 100%.

So no client will ever again, for example, try or even the team try to set up a session with me while I'm taking my walk or having lunch.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

Very defendable. I like that. I appreciate a little bit of the flexibility of we know that real life isn't set in stone, so why should our calendars be? And there's a bit of that, and there's a little bit of that defiance in how Reclaim orders things. I like that. I like that a lot.

Jam Mayer

Yep. Now going back to Sunsama, one thing I love is I was hoping that they'd have similar to Reclaim, wherein it just does my calendar for me, but I realised, no. I love the fact that someone's or something is helping me organise my to do list or what I'm gonna do for the day, but not too much. It's the unrealistic workload notification in Sunsama is a favorite of mine. Have you seen it?

Sam Pierre-Gilles

I did, and it's really good. Some of us don't have the luxury of shorter workdays.

But some of us do. It was really nice, but as someone who frankly moonlights for the AI product report and trying to track my work with the AI product report and for my day job. It was telling me that I was just permanently overloaded and that something needed to be done to re-address the situation. And I I thought about it to myself a little bit. I definitely don't want to be burning a candle at both ends any more than I absolutely have to. It's just like an extra red dot on the dash being like, hey.

Are you sure you wanna do this so far? It's fantastic.

Jam Mayer

It's, look. I'm a workaholic. I will say that. Right? Especially when we love what we're doing, we tend to just, hey. Look. It's a Saturday right now. I should be spending time well, it's raining right now, so it's a wet day.

Jam Mayer

So it's not a beach day.

Jam Mayer

Do you know what I mean? It's not a walk on a beach day kinda thing. However, I could just be just relaxing, so to speak, or doing something else instead of blah and just have that work life balance. And I think that's the reason why Sunsama exists. Reminder, life is not all about work 100%, but there is that other school of thought. I mean, if you love what you do, it doesn't really matter.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

It doesn't feel like work. It doesn't feel like work until you realise your doctor sits you down and says, you've been working a lot. Why? It's your partner that booked your medical appointment. We're here to talk about your workload. Yeah. Ask me how I know. Exactly. But I wanna piggyback a little bit on what you mentioned just about Sunsama, and I see how it fits for a certain degree of mindfulness in existence at the same time because even in my inbox, I set myself up for the, Sunsama trial for a while as well, my inbox, almost every day, I had some kind of notice from someone on the team at Sunsama being like, hey.

By the way, like, you know, here's a few mindfulness tips around how you work, around how you do XYZ. Remember, things that you don't handle today aren't gonna magically go up in flames for the most part. Things are still pretty pretty alright. A lot of the, what I would call a bit of, like, emotional support across the day to day life, Like, Sunsama as a team felt like, hey, you know, there's there's a bit of a support team looking out for me, And so that was kind of an interesting experiential component to what is otherwise, like, very much a SaaS solution. A SaaS product. It was really like a small touch, but the experienced designer in me is like, I see you. I see you with that.

Jam Mayer

Anything else that you've seen or tried out with both of them, or do you have a favorite?

Sam Pierre-Gilles

Reclaim has my heart at this point to tell you the truth, and being able to plug and play accounts with the way that I have this set up is, frankly, fantastic. Very comfortable to work in. There's a few things honestly around the setup guide that I had to go in and tweak myself, mostly relating to allowing more working hours to actually Yeah. Just Yep. Rip the door.

Jam Mayer

Right.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. There were a few times across my days that I wanted to defend every day no matter what. Taking a proper break for dinner, taking a proper break to handle a few other things, get up, stretch fitness, etcetera, etcetera. Once I had taken the time to properly define my constraints, Reclaim was playing to that tune very well. But a lot of it, it entirely depends truly on how you set your constraints.

Jam Mayer

If I was talking to let's call her Lila. If you're a graphic designer, maybe an entrepreneur, and these are your pain points. Right? So how can these tools help? Again, I don't have a favorite. Both can be. I'm not saying you should use both, but Lila, for example, could use Sunsama to allow her to plan out her day intentionally. Right? Mhmm. So you use the time blocks for client projects, tasks, and then they've got an objective and have a unified view of, let's say, the deadlines and to dos. Reclaim could then come in and help her automatically defend the time for when she needs, say, for example, need to do some focused work, deep work. Right? While still having availability for those client meetings that all of a sudden, woman, I really need to talk to Jam Mayer

And it's also great to prioritise and defend personal times I've mentioned earlier, like walking and whatsoever. This means that she could minimise the overwhelm, right, and managing the business across multiple clients or instead of having multiple platforms, then you've got these things, these tools, either or. And she can be more productive, I would think, while working fewer hours because going back Sunsama is going, hey, do you really wanna spend 12 hours today working and stuff? And just a reminder, That's how I see how these tools can help her or anyone else there.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

I definitely see that as just an example, Lila's part of a scrum team. She's a graphic designer by trade, but now she's got stand ups every morning. She's got a few reviews that she has to take part of because the larger delivery is on a web based something that requires quite a bit of design work regularly to upkeep it because you may have less stakeholders, you may have more, and maybe your client time is a bit more intentional and it's a bit more structured. I could definitely see instantly the balance of both solutions ends up being the better way to go rather than going for 1 or the other.

Jam Mayer

So for our listeners and viewers, we'd like you to cast your vote. Yes. There is some voting system in here. Which one would you choose? Which you think would solve your problem? We have to own it. What's your problem? Again, it could be 1, 2, maybe there's a third. Let us know. We'll provide the links to you on the show notes in our website. If you're a Spotify listener, it's easy voting, so we're gonna put that in there.

And, of course, if you're interested in learning more about these tools in the live session, so, Sam, join me at the Conversologists Lab too because that's a community.

Sam Pierre-Gilles

As a big YouTube fan myself, remember to like, comment, subscribe, and I'd love to see you in the comments and find out, like, what your hot takes are about some of these solutions around the daily optimizers, the bit of everything else. And I'm sure we have more than one comment section, but specific shout out to YouTube.

Jam Mayer

Definitely. Okay. So don't forget to hit that follow button. Of course. So thanks for listening. And as always, let's keep the nerdgasms going. Right, Sam?

Sam Pierre-Gilles

Absolutely!