I Tried Motion, The AI-powered Productivity App. Here’s What I Learned.
If you’re into productivity, chances are you’ve seen an ad on social media for Motion. The app uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically schedule and prioritize your tasks. Because I love trying productivity apps, I wanted to give it a try.
I’ll be honest — I was a little skeptical. One ad claims, “To-do lists and calendars are dead.” For someone who LOVES a good to-do list, this almost sounds like blasphemy!
I also questioned what AI brings to the table. Scheduling things isn’t typically a challenge for me, so I wondered about the benefits of AI.
The Trial
Motion comes with a free 7-day trial period. When you enter your credit card number you must choose if you want to do the monthly plan ($34/month) or the annual plan ($228 annually or $19/month). Because I like saving money, I selected the annual plan.
Even if you sign-up for Motion from your phone, you HAVE to set up your account from a computer. This is a little cumbersome, particularly when so many people use their phone almost exclusively.
Sign-up is also limited to Google or Microsoft accounts (sorry Hotmail). I ran into a major problem because my work account for Microsoft is blocked from outside apps. While I was able to work around this by signing up with personal account, it created some issues later.
Be warned — my free trial ends tomorrow and so far, I haven’t gotten any reminders that I’m going to be charged. (I don’t want $228 sneaking up on me)!
The Set Up
The first thing to do is connect any additional accounts that may have calendar items. This is where not being able to access my work account was a challenge. The bulk of my calendar is on my work account. I either had to duplicate everything manually in Motion or leave my work hours out of the trial.
Next, set up your default work schedule. Motion will use this when scheduling your tasks. You can create additional schedules to force certain projects into those times. I created a “side hustle” schedule for the morning and evening hours so all my personal projects wouldn’t be scheduled during the workday.
I love the schedule feature, as it allows you to block time for every area of your life. I only wish I had set the default schedule to my side hustle hours, since I had to manually change schedules every time I created a task. (I’ve corrected this now).
App Overview
Motion has two main sections: Calendar and Projects & Tasks. (So much for to-do lists and calendars being dead)
In the Calendar section you can choose either a weekly view or a daily view. The sidebar lists tasks by days, which means I kept the calendar in week view. You can create events for specific times. Tasks will be auto scheduled around these events.
The Projects & Tasks section also has two views: a traditional list view and a Kanban board v. In the list view, projects can be expanded or collapsed to see/hide tasks. The Kanban board sorts tasks by priority (low, medium, high, and ASAP). Both views have filters as well.
You can also assign projects and tasks to workspaces, which are listed on the sidebar from the Projects & Tasks page. Workspaces can be used to separate projects by clients, or for big projects that need an extra layer of organization. In addition to workspaces, you can also use labels as an additional filter
Like with any project management software, it can only manage the projects it knows about. This means you must enter all your projects and tasks into Motion before the app is useful.
While other apps have a way to import data, I didn’t see that feature in Motion. You can create templates that allow you to create default settings for your projects or tasks.
In all honesty, the project management piece is not as high-powered as some of the big, established names in the market. That’s ok because its differentiating point is the AI (which we’re getting to) But it does have all the basic features — start date, deadline, duration, status, etc. If you’re using Motion with a team, you can also assign tasks to other team members.
Motion also allows you to make some tasks dependent on others, although this feature is not available when you create the task. It feels a bit clunky to go back and create all the dependencies. It also has sub-tasks, but you can not set time frames, dependencies, or priorities for sub tasks.
The Artificial Intelligence
Here’s what it all comes down to…how does the AI make your life easier and better?
Motion uses the inputs from your tasks (deadline, priority, duration) to plug tasks into available time in your schedule. You can allow it to break tasks up into blocks and specify the shortest amount of time for each block. This is great for deep work that you don’t want to do in 15-minute sections.
Once everything is entered, the tasks automatically appear on your calendar. If you don’t like the way Motion schedules your tasks, you can play with the settings (priority or deadline) to force it to reorder everything. I found the easiest way to force the issue was to change my start date for a later time or de-prioritize a task.
You can also set deadlines and priorities at the project level. I didn’t get to play with this enough to see how it affects scheduling, but I would assume a task from a high priority project would get scheduled before a task from a lower priority project.
When you are supposed to start a new task, Motion notifies you it’s time to start. I felt a little overwhelmed at first because I didn’t start exactly on time, and I didn’t allocate enough time in the beginning. As a result, I was “behind” at first, which kind of stressed me out.
This actually gave me an opportunity to see the AI in action. If you miss a task, it will automatically find a new spot for it and move things around accordingly.
The automatic rescheduling allows you to keep your priorities in place, even if you miss a deadline.
You can snooze tasks to a later date or move them to your backlog if you’re not able to complete them on time. Once you mark a task complete, it will remove it from the scheduling queue.
Other Features
Motion also allows you to block focus time to prevent meetings from taking over your day. This only works if you are in complete control of your schedule (i.e. you don’t have a boss scheduling meetings around their availability).
Speaking of scheduling, you can set times you are available to meet and share a scheduling link with team members or clients. Similar to Calendly, people can see your available slots in real time and select one that works best for them.
While you can’t create your account on your phone, Motion does have a mobile app. It’s great for checking your schedule and seeing what’s next but was a little clunky for entering tasks and creating projects. This is probably best done from the computer.
You can also use Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or Zoom to host virtual meetings. To use this and the scheduler, you have to give Motion permission to email from your account on your behalf.
My Take
Overall, I really like Motion and think it brings unique features to the existing marketplace. While it’s not the most intuitive project management app, the AI features, along with the scheduling tool (a $12/month value if you already used Calendly) make Motion a great option.
I think the 7-day trial period is too short to really get a feel for what Motion can do. As with any app, there is a lot of set up time to get it fully dialed in. It’s hard to know how much to spend on set up for a 1-week trial — you don’t want to spend all your time configuring the app if you’re going to cancel.
I wish I had chosen the month-to-month option instead of the annual plan. I am fine investing $34 for another month to play with it some more. But because I can’t connect my work calendar, it’s hard for me to consider plunking down $228 to manage my evenings and weekends.
Ultimately, I canceled the annual plan and then re-purchased the month-to-month plan. I’m hoping another month with Motion will change my mind.
If I had access to my work calendar or if I was a full-time entrepreneur, I would definitely commit to Motion to manage my calendar and priorities. Once I got used to the AI scheduling, I realized it was helping eliminate decision fatigue. I didn’t think I needed help deciding what task to work on next, but it was nice to have one less thing to think about.
For me, a huge selling point for Motion is it allows you to create unique schedules. I believe in setting goals in all areas of life, so having a way to group your professional, personal, and purpose projects in one place is a win for me.
Overall, I highly recommend if you can use the app full time. But be aware that you may want more time than one week to really get into the flow of Motion.
If you’re looking for a more in-depth review , check out this Motion app review from my friends over at Efficient App!
