This is somewhat of a newer category, some refer to it as "daily planners", others "time blocking". All-in-all, it's traditionally a calendar app that has put some thought into how tasks, meetings, and event scheduling all affect your day-to-day.
At the end of the day, everyone is on an equal playing field in that we all only have 24 hours in a day. Some people fill that time with meetings, others tasks, and this category asks the question:
How much time do you actually have free in your day? And what work should we prioritize getting done during those free blocks of time?
With that said, the only app in this category that truly checks all of the boxes is Motion, but there are some others that can best be described in this category as they don't fit into any others very well.
Motion in particular started out as a calendar scheduler, then moved into task management, before closing the loop on the time management category. That's when they finally moved into the project management space to be the first project manager with calendar and time management baked in at the core.
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For Small + Mid-Market teams looking to for an AI-powerd time management platform (Calendar + Scheduling + Tasks & Projects).
Motion is a tool that I've been looking for ever since Sunrise Calendar was acquired by Microsoft, more than a decade ago. Since that faithful day, I've been on the never-ending journey of evaluating every single calendar/scheduler/task manager on the market, in search for what I once had.
We believe that Motion is creating a new category entirely, and while you'll see us compare it with the best project management software on the market, you'll see that it isn't just a traditional project manager. And with that, let's dive in:
Rating: A+
Motion isn't just a calendar, scheduler, or task manager. It's really an AI assistant that takes all of this unique information, and uses it to build your perfect day:
Other project management tools require you spend chunks of your day re-evaluating deadlines and shifting back work. Not to mention, they have no actual reference of your calendar, so actual focus time available doesn't even take into account when you're in meetings... 😅
That's where Motion is different, and in some ways, in a category of its own. What they are doing is unmatched in the project management space, and when you compare Motion vs Asana amongst others in the category, you see how outdated traditional task management tools truly are.
They've also taken this whole time management category and leveled up your project management software with a baked in calendar scheduler that takes into account all of your tasks and hard deadlines, along with time blocking to only recommend the best times for you to meet with others, ensuring that you can still get your work done on time. Something that no other project manager can do.
Rating: B-
Motion has a functional calendar/task interface that has your most important tasks on the left, and a calendar on the right. When comparing Motion and Cron, you start to see where the UI could be improved:
The plus side here is that the UI could be improved with some pretty minor tweaks, like making it more obvious as to what the current day is, having less harsh and lighter color pallet for events and tasks (in both light and dark mode), displaying calendar text in a more useful/way (versus getting cut off sharply), amongst other modifications.
We have faith that the team will make the much needed improvements here, and since it would require such minor modifications, we can't weigh this section too heavily against Motion. With these modifications, we feel Motion can pretty easily get to a B+ rating in this category.
Rating: B
The main benefit of Motion, and how it differentiates from every other project management tool on the market is you add your tasks to it, then you forget about it. It will automatically schedule your tasks into your calendar to ensure that you get them done by the time they need to be completed.
With other tools like Asana, you need to manually reschedule your tasks manually on a daily basis, wasting anywhere from 20–60 minutes per day—something you don't even need to think about with Motion.
We would have actually rated Motion as an A in the UX area back when it was a Chromium extension, because it would do incredibly impressive things like automatically pulling up your calendar when visiting a calendly link within the browser, showing you in Motion what times work best for you.
The problem was, there's just too much limitation as a Chromium extension versus being a fully standalone app, so they made the right directional move, they just need to bring some of these super thoughtful experiences back to the desktop app.
Motion is always a keyboard shortcut away (OPT + C), and that's one of the things we love most about using it. Once you're in the app though, it would be nice to have less clicks to get to where you're trying to get.
There's also a few times where you'd actually want to open back up Google Calendar, in things like proposing a new time for example, or editing a team's calendar event (even if you're invited to it), so fixing these things will greatly improve the UX. We're confident that they can actually get this up to an A in the next 6–18 months.
Rating: B-
Motion has an iOS and Android app that is fully-featured, including the full calendar functionality, along with your complete project task lists, and quick access to booking links while on-the-go.
Things we'd love to see to bring Motion up to an A is a proper widget to replace the need for Google Calendar entirely. Some quality UX improvements could be made with having a way to more easily create tasks from other apps, by say sharing a screenshot to Motion, or highlighting text and sharing it with Motion (or even using Siri/Google Assistant to create tasks while on-the-go).
One little knit-pick is the time it takes for the mobile app to load, although this is something that the team is aware of, and we feel pretty confident that the mobile app will hit B+ category in the months to come.
Rating: C+
We have to hand it to the team at Motion on this one—they launched an API, and then almost immediately spun up a Zapier integration to make their API even more accessible to others, something that newer tools in the space haven't invested in which makes Motion stand out, and something we greatly appreciate.
The API is surely to improve with time, adding in more functionality, although it does allow for the major things you'd want to use it for already, like create/find/update of tasks, and most importantly, creating the magic auto-scheduled task.
The one thing that the API is lacking though is on the appointment scheduling side of things. For example, you can't get the same type of API functionality that a tool like Calendly will give you on that front, although you can actually build some of the same functionality (like logging new appointments into your CRM upon booking) using a tool like Mailparser alongside Zapier (although I will say, it's not that straightforward). 😅
If Motion added in API functionality for their scheduler, we'd put Motion's API at a solid B, which is all you'd really need it to be.
If you're anything like me and just starting the quest of your own (or in the middle of it), let me save you some time: you'll likely stumble upon calendar tools like Cron, Vimcal, Magical, Fantastical, Woven (acquired by Slack), and many more scheduler-focused tools like Calendly, ChiliPiper, and Cal.com (amongst many others), along with no shortage of all-in-one task management tools (e.g. Sunsama and Akiflow), heck, even "time management" tools like Clockwise and Reclaim.
Well I'm here to tell you that I've tried them all—extensively.
Each and every tool mentioned does some aspects to time management well, but fall apart when done together.
And that's where Motion is different. Motion is more than just a calendar, scheduler, or task/project manager—it is a platform for time management. Because at the end of the day, we're all just managing time—sometimes by way of projects and tasks, and at other times meetings and events. Motion understands this fact first-and-foremost, and with a small sprinkle of AI, you're given your perfect day planned out for you, no rescheduling or rearranging necessary.
We've actually fully switched to Motion from Asana after using Asana for 7+ years.
If you're looking for a deeper dive comparison on the project management of Motion, you can check out a deep dive project management comparison that covers all of that here.
That said, I've finally found what I've been looking for. (Oh and there's actually quite a bit more to the story if you're interested in hearing more)
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There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
While there's currently no promo code available, if you use the link above and you let their team know that we sent you, they might even extend your free trial (if you write into support) 😉
An intelligent habit and task time-blocking and event scheduling layer atop your calendar.
Reclaim is in a bit of a non-standard category. It's sort of a scheduler and basic task manager with a "sprinkle of AI"—the best way to describe them is as an intelligent scheduling layer atop your calendar.
You may have stumbled upon it when looking for a time blocking tool, which is what Reclaim does quite well.
In-fact, we used Reclaim for nearly a year, evaluating it alongside Motion for our team. The main distinction between the two is that Reclaim is trying to be a smart layer atop your calendar, whereas with Motion, you no longer need to visit Google Calendar (although mind you, both of these tools require Google or Microsoft as your calendar's foundation).
Reclaim's main focus is trying to help you fit in the the things that you want to do from day-to-day, whether that be tasks, smart internal 1-on-1 meetings, or even habits.
This is what leaves them in a bit of an odd spot though, want to use their task management features? Well they are incredibly barebones and things will get quite overwhelming with any meaningful number of tasks because of this. There's no thoughtful prioritization, deadlines, or dependencies.
Rather, they have gone the path of "we aren't going to be a full project manager, we'll just have a basic integration with your existing project management tool".
While this might sound great to some—it starts falling apart quite quickly (for which I'll cover in the competition and final thoughts sections).
Reclaim allows for super basic calendar scheduling (externally and with team members), similar to that of Calendly and Motion although it lacks in scheduler features.
They also give reporting stats on how your time has been spent between work and personal. Another feature that seems cool on the surface, but in actually reporting in on a weekly basis to check it out, it doesn't really allow you to take anything meaningful from it:
The strange thing here is that while we feel like many people are talking about Motion vs Reclaim, Reclaim feels to be more of a competitor to that of something like Clockwise than it is to Motion directly.
This is because Reclaim is in no way a proper individual or team project manager. Even their task management capabilities are incredibly basic. There's no organization/categorization, recurrence functionality, deadlines, or priority setting.
This is where they've chosen the integration path with other Project Managers on the market versus attempting to build it themselves (unlike Motion).
The interesting part of this is exactly what Motion actually tried doing in the early days, a deep integration with Asana was actually the first attempt at task management.
Believe it or not, they decided to deprecate the integration entirely and just build a full task/project management tool themselves, because they realized true AI task blocking required that you have very specific prioritization metrics in order to get optimal results.
For example, you don't have to set a priority or task duration in Asana, so how is an AI algorithm supposed to truly prioritize what is most important.
There's no way to set a task as "personal" or "work", which is important for when it should schedule the task on your calendar—during work hours or on the weekend?
So what Motion realized (and what Reclaim is going to realize real soon), is that the project management integration path is always going to give sub-optimal results, because too much critical context is missing.
This results in Reclaim just throwing random tasks at you from a day-to-day basis that rarely actually fit into what is most important to get done.
We find Reclaim interesting in what they are trying to accomplish top-level, but we find that they go too broad and shallow in terms of feature depth.
What do I mean? Well, using Reclaim as your scheduler has a lot to be desired—you can't even add basic questions for someone to answer upon filling out the booking link.
This makes it impossible to replace other scheduling tools like Calendly and Motion unless your booking needs are quite simple.
Their tasks functionality is more around basic to-do's and there's no way that prioritization logic can be done with just a task name and duration. Doing the laundry may take me 1 hour, but invoicing customers on the 1st of the month, 30 minutes—which is more important though? The shorter one, right 😅
That's the reoccurring theme we're getting with Reclaim—they have a bunch of time management/blocking features, and tout "AI" at the core, but we just don't see it. AI works when you have more data-points around dependencies, priority, deadlines, etc.
And that's where time and time again, we'll recommend Motion if you're interested in all the time blocking features, but want actually meaningful task/project management capabilities.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
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The time management category is a super confusing category that is changing a lot as of lately. To determine if Motion or Reclaim is a better solution for you, we should focus on the sub-categories of time management.
Winner: Motion
If you're looking for a proper task/project management tool, Reclaim is sure to let you down. Of the two tools, Motion actually has an impressive prioritization algorithm, that helps you prioritize the most important work to get done every day.
We found that if you have more than 10 or so tasks active at a given time, you're going to feel like you're getting the wrong tasks prioritized to you every day when using Reclaim.
Motion on the other hand has a myriad of prioritization tools, like priority, deadline, and a special AI algorithm that takes all of that into account when planning your day.
Start your 7 day free trial for Motion today.
Winner: Motion
For individual and basic team usage, this is Motion's bread and butter. They were actually solely a calendar and appointment scheduler before they even moved into the time management and task management space. People report Motion as being a 50–100% better Calendly for individual usage in-fact. For a more in-depth breakdown, you can check out our Motion vs Calendly comparison if you'd like to see how they compare, as if you're looking for deeper team scheduling features or deep appointment booking integration, Calendly might be a better fit.
That said, Motion lets you go incredibly granular on all your scheduling preferences. Want a scheduler link that doesn't allow people to book over your scheduled tasks? What about just respect the important ones. You can do all of that and more with Motion. They've truly thought about how to improve the scheduler category, and they've done an exceptional job on that front.
We found that Reclaim has a super barebones appointment scheduler that has a lot to be desired. Want to have a scheduler link that prioritizes meetings over unimportant tasks, but not critical ones? Can't do that. Want to add more complex questions (e.g. dropdown select fields), when someone is booking? Can't do that either.
Start your 7 day free trial for Motion today.
Winner: Reclaim
If you're instead someone that has tons of internal meetings on your calendar every day, and you need a tool that can help you find more focused time blocks, that's where Reclaim stands out.
This also gets into a slightly different category though, which introduces other competitors, so if team meeting optimization is something that you're looking for, you might want to refer to our Clockwise vs Reclaim comparison instead.
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