Motion: Tasks & AI Scheduling 4+

This app is so user friendly and I love how it keeps in sync with my Google calendar. I use it so much that I actually made it one of my 4 shortcut icons across the bottom of my phone. My favorite thing about it is as my day goes on and surprises happen, my to do items shift around throughout the day. So if i planned to take 2 important things and 1 low priority thing from 10:00-11:00, but I ended up in a conference call and didn’t do the tasks …when 11:00 hits and I haven’t checked them off, the rest of my day reschedules to make sure I get those 2 important things in somewhere…maybe a few low priority things will shift to tomorrow in order to free up the time. I LOVE a paper calendar with multi colored markers and to do lists…but this is MUCH more efficient because I can plan my day out all that I want, but surprises and emergencies are inevitable. No more drawing arrows all over my paper calendars to show where I’m moving a task to 😂
I also love that the recurring task feature is flexible…so for example I do payroll every 2 weeks and it just has to be done by Wednesday at noon. I have the task recurring every 2 weeks from Monday-Wednesday, and motion will fit it into a convenient spot so I’m not scrambling at the last minute- I’m usually getting payroll in a day or two early now!
Worth every penny for this mom of busy teens, medical provider, multi-practice owner with rentals and caring for elderly relatives.

I have 3 clients. Each of these clients have me work on multiple projects: course creation; content creation; student training, etc. Each of these projects are different priorities with different due dates and some will take longer to complete than others. A couple days ago I found myself with a 5 hour block with no meetings and was so excited to actually get some work done …and had no idea what to do. I’ve also thought Time Blocking was arbitrary and therefore I was resistant. But now, Motion looks at my workload across all my clients, factors in priorities, durations, and due dates and tells me what to work on and I AM HERE FOR IT! It’s taking me a little time to figure out how to “set up” but I’m getting there. (Example: do I need to identify tasks and subtasks, or is it enough to enter the task, estimate the total duration to finish and allow Motion to break that time into chunks? So far the latter is much easier/faster and works for many of my simpler projects). Today, I’m setting up Motion with Siri, so I can add tasks on the fly. I’ve been a customer for like 4 days and I think I’m in love.

OK, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and say there is artificial intelligence in play here. I haven’t seen anything of that sort in my trial time. It looks like there is an algorithm that works based on the constraints that I set(time of day, priority, deadline, duration). It just fills the schedule based on these parameters. An AI, with the new meaning of the paradigm, would change those around against the user’s settings based on previous data. I don’t see any of that except the email-to-task feature (which’s usually a miss, in so many ways). But its existence is cool by itself. So I don’t mind.

As for the mobile app, it’s not as good as the Mac app, and that’s a problem. So the 2 stars is for the mobile app. The Mac app would get maybe 3 or 4. The whole platform would get a solid 3 from me. I plan to get the full year and commit to be a personal user. My only fear is the developers are hoping to switch to the business to business area for bigger customer base and profits, which will probably mean irrelevant features for me on the long run (the whole booking tab is useless to me already). I hope they can find some balance, and at least keep it bug free and usable for the solo users all the time. Because I certainly won’t start a company in the near future based on what my schedule tells me :) and I’ll leave the app for the first reasonable competition on sight if things come to it.