I have been using an app called Motion for a good while now and it has completely changed the way I think about my work and productivity. At the same time, I always thought their marketing and the founder’s sale pitch were a bit bizarre (sorry), potentially putting off some users who would otherwise be a great fit. So, I’m taking a shot at explaining what’s revolutionary about the product. I’m in no way affiliated with the company. I’m paying to use the product.
Motion is a task manager + automatic scheduler.
It’s the automatic scheduler part that’s providing the added value. Let me break down what that means. Micro-planning: a subtle yet significant overhead in your workday
If you are a knowledge worker, you likely start each day with a list of things you would like to work on, plus several meetings booked in your calendar. You also control how you spend your workday, as your boss is luckily not a micro-manager.
In this case, your workday is spent on either one of the following:
- Deciding what to do
- Doing it
Picture this: You have a good hour before the day’s first meeting, so you’d like to spend the hour doing the task that requires the hardest thinking. After the meeting, you intend to work on the second item on your to-do list until lunch. The afternoon is less thought out, but you’ll take on the things you feel most energetic about between the meetings. You bought yourself a good cup of coffee, ready to start your workday.
Then you notice a message from a client that needs to be taken care of as soon as possible. Being a professional, you’d clear the issue right away. When you return to your desk, it’s already 15 minutes before the first meeting. Your morning plan is no longer feasible, so you spend an extra 5 minutes restructuring the day. With all that effort, there is still a relatively fat chance of receiving another interruption.
Sound familiar?
This kind of micro-planning never gets captured in your average to-do list or project management software. The sum of all visible activities doesn’t match the hours worked. It is the dark matter of productivity and a significant overhead in anyone’s workday.
The context switch incurred by frequent meetings already has a bad enough impact on your cognitive ability. Fatigue from executing these micro-decisions adds up to suck your willpower away. The natural response is to go with your gut feeling to decide the next task. This feels easy, though you are now prone to picking the low-hanging fruit first. You will feel busy but may not achieve as well as you could, had the proper planning happened.
Back-to-school — well not literally
When you were still at school, there was much less deciding what to do next, as your timetable had already been determined. You move from class to class, sit down, open the textbook and focus on doing what you are supposed to be doing. In other words, there’s virtually zero micro-planning.
This is what Motion does for you, albeit in a more grown-up, dynamic way.
While I have zero internal knowledge of their scheduling algorithm, I can talk about how it works. For any task, you are asked to enter:
- Priority
- Deadline (Hard/Soft/None)
- Estimated duration, with an option to allow segmenting into chunks
- Allowed times
The first two would be very familiar if you’ve ever done project management in any capacity. It is also the two main parameters used in the Eisenhower Matrix — a 1950s concept. I’ve tried the Eisenhower Matrix to assist with my planning, though I failed to apply it to my day-to-day decisions except for longer-term items, which in today’s terms would be more appropriate to call project roles.
The third item, estimated duration, automatically packs tasks into a workday, eliminating the need to plan and re-plan your day even when things change. I can’t stress enough how much time and willpower this can save.
The fourth, allowed times (my own term), is a nice twist. In Motion, you can have separate calendars to fit your tasks into. For example, your work hours might be 9 am-6 pm every weekday. You may also prefer to dedicate mornings to cognitively challenging tasks (Deep Work, anyone?). By designating tasks to a particular calendar, you can fine-tune when in the week specific work happens.
There is a functionality to add recurring tasks, as well as a meeting scheduler that is aware of everything mentioned above.
The potential variations of fitting tasks into your calendar can be substantial. It can come in any order with potential segmenting of larger tasks. By default, Motion avoids segmenting as much as possible as long as the resultant schedule meets all the deadlines. The proclaimed “AI” scheduler part probably reflects that they are statistically deducing the best-ish schedule out of millions of all possible configurations.
I remember seeing “your AI personal assistant” as their marketing copy and thinking, that’s an indigent representation of their product, as I’m yet to meet a human assistant who is capable of rescheduling everything (not just your meeting) whenever
- A meeting is added or deleted
- A new task comes up
- A task takes longer or shorter than expected
And does that 24/7, with an astonishing level of optimisation. I mean, who does that?
This will hopefully be the last task manager switch I will ever make
I have used everything from Things 3 to Wunderlist to Asana to Trello, with additional techniques like using hashtags to designate estimated duration and the Eisenhower quadrant. None stuck as they failed to reduce the micro-planning overhead enough.
These days, I get visibly upset when Motion goes down for maintenance. The fact that I’m some 8 hours difference from the valley doesn’t help. There’s a lot of room for improvement, especially in their mobile offering, but with their recent fundraising, that should be resolved in time.
I have yet to get my whole startup to switch to using Motion Team, but I hope that at least some of the employees get on board after this post. There are advantages of more specialised products such as Monday or JIRA, but the reduction in the planning effort should be felt for multitaskers within the company.