Kept vs Sunsama

What Sunsama gets genuinely right

Sunsama's guided daily ritual is a real idea, executed with care. Each morning it walks you through choosing what to work on, estimating how long things take, and keeping the day honest against your calendar. The evening shutdown ritual is genuinely good for people prone to overwork. It integrates cleanly with the work stack · Gmail, Slack, Trello, Asana, your calendar · and it never shames you with red badges.

For knowledge workers whose day is mostly meetings plus a task list, and who want a mindful planning practice they perform themselves, Sunsama is probably the most humane tool on the market. Its roughly $20/month price has not stopped people from paying it for years, which tells you the ritual delivers value.

The ritual is manual, and the scope is work

Sunsama's strength is also its demand: the ritual is yours to perform, every day, by hand. You select the tasks, you estimate them, you place them. Skip the ritual for a week and the system has nothing to say about it. That's by design · Sunsama believes the manual act is the point · but it means the tool's value is gated on a habit you must sustain indefinitely.

The second limit is scope. Sunsama plans your workday. It doesn't know about your training plan, your meals, your habits, or the person you're trying to become. The half of your life that happens outside the laptop · the easy 8-miler, eating to fuel the long run, calling someone you love · lives in other apps, on other surfaces, integrated by you. And Sunsama is desktop-first; the day you're planning is mostly lived away from your desk.

What Kept does instead

Kept keeps the calm and removes the chore. Capture takes one line · say it, and it's filed as the right task, event, or note with the right date and priority. The plan assembles itself from what you've captured, what's on your calendar, and what you've promised yourself; your job is to glance, adjust, and live it. No daily assembly required, so the system still works in the weeks when you don't have the discipline to work it. That's when you need it most.

And Kept's surface is your whole life, not your job: tasks and calendar next to habits, training, food, and focus. The morning glance shows the deep-work block and the easy run on the same screen, because you live them in the same day.

There's also a layer Sunsama doesn't attempt: identity. You declare who you're becoming, and every kept promise is logged as a vote of evidence. Not affirmations · receipts.

A day in each

In Sunsama, a good morning starts with ten deliberate minutes: pull tasks from your tools, estimate each one, lay them against the calendar, trim until the day is honest. Done consistently, it's a genuinely good practice · the planning equivalent of journaling.

In Kept, the day is already standing when you arrive. The things you said out loud yesterday · "easy run 8 miles tomorrow," "draft the board deck, high priority, Friday" · are filed and placed. Your morning glance takes thirty seconds: the identity line, the few things that move you toward it, the protocol you're keeping. You adjust what's wrong, then go live it. The evening close is a checkmark and two lines, not a ceremony.

Neither is lazy and neither is frantic. The difference is where the effort goes: Sunsama spends it on assembling the plan, Kept spends it on keeping the promises in the plan.

Who should pick which

Pick Sunsama if the manual ritual is the feature for you · if you want a mindful, hand-built plan each morning and your planning needs end at work. It's the best version of that product, and it's earned its reputation.

Pick Kept if you want the calm without the ceremony: capture in a sentence, a day that organizes itself, and one surface that holds work and body and mind together. At a fair annual price that undercuts the roughly $240/year of the guided-ritual tools while covering far more of your life.