With my current job position, I have a lot of moving parts in my schedule and am constantly scheduling a lot of meetings throughout each week. Inevitably, they get cancelled or postponed to a later date, and there are times when I can’t keep up with who I am meeting and when. Anyone else have this problem?
With the technology and smartphones that we have, I know it is a lot easier to take control of your calendar and see when things are happening. Sometimes I just want to know what is coming up for the current day. That is where Sunrise.im comes into play. It is a simple way to take a look at your daily schedule without all of the clutter and it is so easy to use. Let’s take a look.
Setting Up Sunrise
When you first sign up for Sunrise, they make it very easy for you. You will want to make sure you connect with your Google account, and you have options to connect with your Facebook, LinkedIn and Eventbrite accounts. You can choose which Google Calendars to connect to and if you have multiple accounts then you can connect them as well. Then, really, that is all you have to do, there are no more settings to mess with. This can be a good thing in that they make it dead simple for you to get started. At the same time, it would be nice to see more settings features, which I will get into later.
Sunrise Settings
Using Sunrise
After you set up your notifications, you are now pretty much done and you just let the app work for you. What Sunrise does now is it sends you a daily email with all of your appointments for the day. It pulls data from your Google Cal, Facebook birthdays and Eventbrite, and puts them in a very nice, clean email to you to let you see what you have going on for the current day.
Daily Email
Another feature worth mentioning here is that Sunrise has done a pretty good job of integrating Linkedin into the app. What Sunrise does is that if you click on a person’s name in your email it will see if they are on Linkedin and then you can see their profile from within the Sunrise web site. If you have a meeting scheduled with someone and you don’t know much about them or are meeting them for the first time, this can come in very handy.
Linkedin Feature
Why I Like It?
For most people they would look at this and dismiss it because there are other ways to look at your calendar, which is very true. Some people don’t want to add another thing to keep up with their schedule, which I get as well. But, what got me so interested in this is that Sunrise does one thing, and it does it very well. It provides you with a daily email of your schedule for that day, not the week, just that day. For someone like me who has so many other things going on, the last thing I want to do is to look at my schedule to see when a meeting is going to happen. I love that I get the email for that specific day and it helps me concentrate on what I need to do and get through it all before I go home and enjoy my family.
Improvements
As with anything else, Sunrise can use some improvements and it is young, so I suspect that we will continue to see updates on it. For one, although I am a Google user, I would love to see an option for Outlook calendars for those business people that rely heavily on it. Right now if you are not a Google Calendar user, Sunrise is practically useless for you, so it would be nice to see them add more options for other calendars so they can expand their user base.
Secondly, this is not a “have to” feature, but it would be cool to see an iPhone or iPad app that lets you adjust your settings and then you can see your schedule for that day. Basically it would be a combination of the web app and the email combined into one. This may be a good feature for those that don’t want the daily email, but still want the core features of Sunrise. Lastly, I am not the hugest fan of them requiring you to use Facebook to sign in. I think you box yourself in by using a social network to sign up for your app, but that is a post for another time.
Final Thoughts
Although I know that Sunrise won’t be for everyone, I thought it was worth writing a post on it. The app is free to use, and I have no idea if they have any thoughts of charging for it in the future. Overall, it works as advertised, it is very easy to set up, and it is done well. If you are looking for a way to cut through the clutter and have an easy, reliable way to see your schedule for the day, then I would suggest you go over to their site and sign up to get your daily email.