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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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Use AI to plan your work, automatically. Be 137% more productive. Use the AI assistant for busy people and work teams.
Motion (also often referred to as Use Motion and Motion App) is in a category of it's own that we've been referring to as time management…
Let me explain:
Motion's main goal is to take care of all of your team's needs revolving around time. If you're someone that wakes up in the morning and looks at their calendar app to see what you have on for the day, Motion App will fit in like a glove.
It connects in deeply with your Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar, and even Apple Calendar, allowing you to build out project management and task management for yourself and team members. The best part is that all of these tasks automatically organize themselves based on priority right onto your calendar (and your team's) to ensure the most important (and blocking) tasks get done.
If you've heard of the productivity app terminology of "time blocking", well Motion does that automatically using AI, no manual time blocking needed.
It even goes to the degree of allowing you to share meeting scheduler links with others, all while respecting your existing events across all of your calendars (and even your team's calendars), along with automatically inviting team members into the appointment once booked.
With your entire team using Motion, it's like you have a full-time personal assistant shared across the company, ensuring that everyone is getting deep work done all while focusing on what is most important (at the most ideal time), all while making sure that no one is ever double-booked.
All of this makes for an incredibly powerful tool for individuals, but exponentially more valuable with every additional team member you add. No other project management or daily planner tool on the market seems to go to this degree.
As compared to some of the best project management software on the market often mentioned like Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Motion has taken their sights on slightly smaller teams of between 1–50 people.
This team size target is based on their current feature-set, from what we've seen. For example, the larger teams that we work with who have many layers of management often require reporting capabilities over everything else. And with Motion, that's not something you're going to get, because they are currently focused on giving the only AI project management tool on the market focused on helping the individual and teams, over the needs of upper-management.
So if you and your team are used to spending a lot of time planning deadlines, and rearranging your "My Task" view in the existing tools on the market, Motion flips this on it's head with the use of AI. Something to consider if you're fed up with the manual work involved with traditional project management tools.
Compared to the best daily planner apps on the market like Sunsama and Akiflow, Motion is the only daily planner we've seen that actually leverages AI to plan your day for you. With all of the other apps in the category, you need to manually drag in tasks to time block and plan each day. This is an incredibly time consuming process, that some justify as being "more mindful", but once you actually have AI schedule your day for you, you realize how much time is actually wasted "mindfully planning your day".
Compared to the best calendar schedulers on the market like Calendly and Chili Piper, Motion bakes in the core functionality of these tools, with the added visibility of team tasks and urgent deadlines, actually booking off availability for you and your team if high priority work needs to get done by a quickly approaching deadline.
Large teams (100–500) with other enterprise software implemented will find integrating Motion more involved than other enterprise tools. When using an enterprise software stack like that of Salesforce, it's common for other project management tools to have native integrations.
With Motion, it will require a custom integration approach (something that we actually help teams do). But while it's possible, one might ask if it's worth making the large investment in a custom integration when you might be able to get something more native out of the box with the other tools focused on larger teams.
(This of course depends on the actual integration needs of your team, as native doesn't always do exactly what you'd like it to do).
Motion currently lacks advanced reporting and dashboard functionality. So while you can see at a top-level the status of projects and tasks in Kanban and Listviews, even a team workload view, that's about where reporting dashboards end, making it less suitable for large teams requiring extensive project analytics.
Note: If you need 2 seats, you're pretty much better off getting the discount by purchasing 3 seats, as you're effectively getting a 3rd seat for free.
If all of that connects with you and you think it might fit your needs, they have a 7 day free trial that you can use along with your team to see what it's like having a personalized AI assistant.
The all-in-one work platform Routine is the next-generation platform for professionals and teams to get things done faster!
Routine app falls into the daily planner + productivity tools category. If you are looking for a habit tracking app to help with daily routine planning, task management and, time blocking for personal use, Routine is an app to consider.
Compared to Motion, Sunsama, and Akiflow which are all task management tools, Routine is the newest kid on the block in the category and aimed for more personal use, while the others are more professionally focused.
Routine is for individuals who are looking for a personal app to help with habit building, daily planning, task management and time blocking. It has a beautiful and thoughtful user interface that makes it very aesthetically pleasing. You can also use it as your main calendar (as it integrates with Google Calendar) and take personal notes within Routine. Routine is a great introduction to using a productivity tool to help form good daily habits and manage your daily schedule.
Motion, Sunsama and Akiflow were built to be tools that can help you better manage your workload, while Routine is something we'd consider using as a "light" version of task management. For example, if you want to time block in more or less static blocks of time and want to build a routine (without much regular rearranging of tasks) then Routine is a great app to consider. Tasks that should go in Routine are healthy habits (e.g. drinking water or tasks to help manage mental health like meditation).
Routine is very much for individuals at the moment, not professionals. Their integrations with project management tools are limited (Notion is currently available while Asana and ClickUp are coming soon, according to the Routine app website). So if you are looking to centralize your tasks from other tools, tools like Akiflow or Sunsama would be much better choices for you.
If you are looking for a comprehensive project management tool, Routine would not be a choice to consider as it is very much a personal routine planner, habit tracking app and task management tool. If your team is not yet using a project management tool (or you individually know you need to manage larger projects), then considering something like Motion might be best as it would eliminate your need for a project management tool + a daily planning tool (it offers daily planning, time blocking, and calendar scheduling capabilities in addition to full project management capabilities).
Rating: C
When comparing Routine app to it's two closest competitors, Sunsama and Akiflow, Routine doesn't have too much differentiation with key features. It feels several steps behind the two apps and while it allows you to have note-taking capabilities (differentiating the tool), we much rather recommend people use proper note taking tools instead like Slite or Notion. The reason is because all your notes end up getting stuck within Routine and you can forget ever being able to collaborate on notes with others. The only share feature Routine has with notes is "exporting" which essentially copies the entire text. Depending on where you send the notes, all formatting can be lost which makes for a very frustrating experience. If you take notes in Routine, we'd recommend making sure they are just for yourself and you won't plan on needing them anywhere else!
Beyond that, Routine is much more a tool to use if you want to plan out your morning routine, or are craving a habit tracking tool with the ability to use free time slots to schedule daily tasks.
Rating: A-
This is where Routine shines. It is the most beautiful task management productivity tools on the market in terms of design. Aesthetically it is very pleasing to use, a gorgeous interface with minimalistic design.
Rating: C-
While Routine is gorgeous to use, we found the user experience limiting and frustrating quite quickly. Initially, integrating with Google Calendar, adding tasks, and dropping them on your calendar is easy.
But what if a task will take you two hours to do, and you urgently need to get it done and you have other tasks on your calendar? You'd imagine that dropping in a task at a specific time would automatically move your other tasks to accommodate for the new task, right? This isn't the case with Routine. You can drag the task to be as long as the free time slot, and beyond that you need to manually rearrange your entire schedule to accommodate the new task 😬😬😬
When you compare Routine vs Motion, Motion uses AI capabilities to arrange your day. Simply making a task low, medium or high priority will auto-schedule it for you based on importance, rearranging all your other tasks. This makes it way easier to arrange your schedule instead of spending time fighting with the tool to get your schedule right. This is why we say Routine app is much better for habit building and planning your daily routine rather than granular tasks.
Because of this, we'd say Routine might be helpful for static tasks like "Mental Health Check-In" or "Cook Dinner" but it's difficult to get super granular with tasks and time blocking as you would need for professional work.
Rating: B-
Routine only has an iOS app which is relatively new (only 4 reviews on the app store to date), with Android is coming soon. Routine can be used as your main calendar app on your phone (instead of Google Calendar) and it is much more beautiful than the others on the market.
Rating: C-
Routine currently doesn't integrate with very much beyond your Google Workspace tools and Notion. You can add tasks in from your email, Notion or manually enter tasks into the app. According to Routine's website, Slack, Asana and ClickUp integrations are coming soon. Although, even with these integrations, the tool doesn't appear to have an API coming in the near future which would make it difficult to build workflows with Routine. If you are using Asana or ClickUp and are looking for a time management tool with deep integrations and powerful workflows, consider Motion or Akiflow.
Is Routine app worth it? Routine currently has a free plan for hobbyists and students and this is where we think the tool probably fits best (not professional use). If you are looking for a productivity tool to help you track new habits, healthy habits, banish bad habits, and plan your daily routine then we think it can be a great app for that. The premium version is very much still under construction (coming soon).
If you're a business, we'd say it's probably best skipping Routine and opting in for something like Motion that along with their AI capabilities, will make you feel like you have a personal assistant helping you plan your projects, tasks and day. Alternatively, if you still enjoy manually planning your day, perhaps Sunsama would be the next best alternative for a workplace app.
Clockwise optimizes your team’s schedules to create more time in everyone’s day.
Clockwise is clear in their focus on helping teams find focus time. This means that if you're an individual, or a small team that doesn't have many internal meetings, Clockwise is not right for you.
If the main goal that you have is getting your team to have all of their internal meetings optimized to give everyone a calendar that is optimized for focused time blocks, that's exactly where Clockwise excels.
The piece that is most confusing to me when using Clockwise is that they have a "planner", which looks like a calendar:
But when you actually dive in to use it, you realize that it has no actual calendaring functionality. While it allows you to create a one-off event, you can't even edit after creating it—it's literally read only. So there's no editing the title/description, adding additional guests, etc. you'll have to go to a separate calendar app like Google Calendar to make any of these changes.
What it does allow you to do is tag existing events (sort of like an over-encompassing category of the event), update internal meetings as "flexible"—AKA you're allowing Clockwise to reschedule them automatically, and manually reschedule meetings to others based on some recommended schedule times:
This is all fine, it's just something that I continually get frustrated by when using these time management tools. Just like Reclaim, it's essentially requiring you to either keep Clockwise open in another tab, or you're restricted to using Google Calendar along with the Clockwise Chrome extension.
So this is where you need to essentially forego using a modern calendar app in favor of using Clockwise properly (or you need to have both apps open side-by-side).
Clockwise touts AI for time management/scheduling, and it seems they've actually gone a bit more true to this than that of Reclaim. They've done this by incorporating a ChatGPT-like interface for which you can speak to in-place of a scheduling assistant.
They claim you can use it for things like "I need to meet with our CTO immediately", which will then suggest some shifts in both your calendars, and then you can move forward with it.
The only question I have here is, should everyone at the company really be able to have that level of control? To be able to switch around team member's calendar to prioritize a meeting with you? There's definitely areas where this would be cool and impressive, I'll admit, it's just I wonder how much actual usage this will get on the day-to-day, versus it just being a really cool AI demo type of feature.
To be crystal clear (as many don't seem to understand this point at first glance), if you primarily have external attendees in your meetings, you cannot mark events as "flexible meetings" and thus, they cannot take advantage of the automatic rescheduling and focus time optimization that Clockwise allows for.
Clockwise is also not a calendar replacement. So you'll still want to use an improved 3rd party calendar like Cron, Motion, or if you must, Google Calendar (which is actually suggested because of the Google Calendar Chromium extension for Clockwise):
While it has scheduler options, replacing the need for tools like Calendly in most cases, and unlike Reclaim, it actually allows for booking questions, they are just a bit barebones in terms of options:
Clockwise fits in as the most focused specifically on re-arranging internal team meetings, to optimize chunks of focus time for teams. This means, if you're using Clockwise solo, or with a small team (or just don't have that many internal meetings), the value in which you'll get from it won't be all that high.
This is where we're more a fan of time management tools that also have task management baked in at the core, because really, what is time management without tasks?
While a tool like Motion will actually fit in tasks that need to be done during your focus blocks of time, Clockwise is more about trying to find you and your team focus blocks of time.
Clockwise also just reschedules meetings and focused time blocks once a day, whereas both Motion and Reclaim react to changes on your calendar immediately.
We find it generally difficult to recommend Clockwise if customers actually have any meaningful scheduler needs though, as something like Motion or Calendly allows for far greater control in adding more opinionated parameters around the booking link. Like in Motion, since it also manager your tasks, you can set a scheduler link to be higher priority in that it'll actually book over scheduled tasks, and even over scheduled events (if you wanted a high-priority link set).
If you have a large team along with frequent internal meetings and you want to optimize everyone's calendars (why wouldn't you want to at that point?), then Clockwise is great!
If you're more looking for a modern time management platform that covers scheduling links, improves your calendar experience (desktop & mobile), and helps you get work done in the focus blocks of time created, that's where Motion is more of the top pick of the category.
We're seeing with Clockwise, just like with Reclaim, that they are trying to hand off the actual task management of getting work done to a proper project manager, which is what makes Clockwise and Reclaim both in a powerful yet narrow sliver to the time management space as a whole.
An intelligent habit and task time-blocking and event scheduling layer atop your calendar.
Reclaim AI is a unique tool sitting in a bit of an in-between product category. It's a lay on top of a calendar that utilizes AI to help you better manage your time by finding the ideal times for your daily habits, meetings, and focus work.
It's a layer on top of your Google Calendar, but it's not a replacement for a project or task manager (you'd integrate your existing task manager or project manager in with Reclaim).
You enter in your habits into Reclaim, like "lunch" and you tell it to schedule your lunch between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Using AI, Reclaim will make sure to schedule your lunch break everyday between those hours, depending what you have to get done. If your schedule shifts, Reclaim will make sure you still get a lunch break.
If you're working a corporate job, are in constant meetings and want to protect your time from getting pulled into meetings, then Reclaim can help you get more focus time and, well, simple things like a lunch break. Engineering, product, or marketing teams that need heads down focus time will benefit the most from Reclaim.
You've probably heard people comparing Motion vs Reclaim, but to be honest, Reclaim is competing more with something like Clockwise, not really Motion. Reclaim isn't your go-to for project management or even for detailed task management (while Motion excels at both these aspects).
You might like Reclaim if you fit into one or all of the below categories:
Using Reclaim as your scheduler leaves a lot to be desired—you can't 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 (learn more in the full Motion App Review) unless your booking needs are quite simple (e.g. internal meetings or meeting with friends).
If you're thinking of using Reclaim for task management, be prepared for something pretty basic. Reclaim more so wants you to integrate your project management tool. It's going to allow you to set task priority and deadline, but it won't let you manage greater projects, collaborate with your team, or get a bigger picture of all of your tasks at hand. Read our full Reclaim AI review.
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