Motion App

Motion calendar app view with tasks auto-scheduled for the week (with time off)

Other project planning software requires you to 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 deep work and focus time available isn't even taken into account when you're in meetings... 😅

Motion automatically re-prioritizes everyone’s tasks and calendar so that everything gets done, on time

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 software space, and when you compare Motion alternatives like Motion vs Asana amongst others in the category, you see how outdated traditional task management tools and truly are.

They've leveled up your project management software with a baked in calendar scheduler that takes into account your task list 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 management software can do.

Oh, and whenever things don’t go according to plan (which they never do), Motion automatically re-prioritizes everyone’s tasks and calendar so that everything gets done, on time. Helping de-stress teammates by offloading all of the cognitive processing surrounding what should be done next.

Motion also lets you use AI to create projects. When you have a new project or workflow, instead of mapping out every single step, you can just write one prompt and Motion will generate a full project template for you. From there, you can edit and customize it to fit your needs.

We've found this is a great way to kick things off quickly. And once you're happy with the process, you can save it as a template to reuse again and again.

Use Motion's AI to create new projects.

Motion also has project stages, which is unique compared to most project management tools. Stages act like milestones, each one has subtasks that need to be completed before you can move on to the next stage.

Create a project template once you're happy with the process.

Because Motion is tied to your calendar, you can set deadlines for each stage, and Motion will instantly show you whether your team is on track to hit them or if you need to readjust.

Here are the stages we use to create a new course (or if you remove that first stage, to create a YouTube video).

In terms of your project management features, you'll get unlimited projects, a fully featured task management tool, equipped with the main task views you need, including list views, kanban boards, and Gantt views. There's highly customizable task priority, deadline, and task dependencies.

Motion Kanban Project Management Task View

I find myself using the calendar + gantt views most as I find the Kanban slightly overwhelming at times.

Mix the task time tracking functionality with Motion being able to see team member's actual calendar events and availability and what you have is an actual team workload view unlike any other.

The big miss with most project management software is that calendar is an afterthought, and yet if someone on your team is tied up in meetings all week and then they have critical tasks assigned to them, do you think they'll be able to get to them?

With Motion, this is made abundantly clear (even flagged automatically), whereas other project management tools literally require an executive assistant or full-time project manager to be monitoring in order to find these issues as they arise.

Compared to other daily planner alternatives Motion is pulling this entire category forward by leveraging AI, tasks mixed with calendar events, time blocking, and prioritization, to build an app that feels like more you have a personal assistant helping you manage your time. Motion is a great productivity tool for solopreneurs, freelancers, contractors and students.

This is where Motion excels when comparing it to the best schedulers on the market.

You can generate meeting scheduler pages and embed them on your website (that take into consideration your specific meeting times for that given event, e.g. we only do meetings on Tuesday/Thursday between 1–4pm, so that's reflected on the page). You can even have it check against team calendar availability (as well as your own work and personal calendar availability of course), allowing you to even generate the meeting request in plain text if that makes you feel better than sending someone to a meeting page:

Create plain-text meeting scheduler requests that check against team calendar availability

We LOVE Motion's Meeting Recorder, and if you're already using Motion for your projects, there's really no reason to use another one. It automatically joins your meetings (you just have to let it in), records video and text, and then uses AI to organize the notes for you.

The quality of the notes are fantastic. When Bob, a new team member, had his first call with another engineer, he tried Motion's AI meeting note taker for the first time and was blown away. He said they were better than anything he could have written himself! And we agree.

Motion's AI note taker even pulls out Action Items for which you can assign to the team in one click.

After each meeting, Motion pulls out to-dos and tasks for the team who were on the call. All you have to do is approve them.

And what's amazing is how integrated it all is. You can link meeting notes directly to projects in Motion, turn a note into a task, or even spin up a whole blog post from a single meeting!

It's seamless, it's powerful, and honestly, it's a 10 out of 10 feature.

Motion also has AI Docs, which are great for storing processes or notes since they’re fully integrated with your projects. They’re not as robust as top note-taking apps like Notion, and the AI isn’t at ChatGPT-5 level, but they’re solid for basic note-taking and formatting. If your team doesn't have a knowledge base software yet, then Motion AI Docs are the perfect place to start.

We're starting to move more of our notes from Slite into Motion because having all our business context in one place is valuable. Just know that while AI Docs are convenient and integrated, they might be a bit limited if you're used to working with a dedicated knowledge base.

But as a heads up, when we really want to do serious writing (e.g. scripting or a full software review), we find ourselves opening Motion docs within Dia or ChatGPT Atlas (our browsers) because using their sidebar chat assistant is faster for writing in our tone, brainstorming, and doing research.

Motion also adds in many quality of life features that makes it stand out when comparing Motion vs Google Calendar for example, like Travel Time which you can add with the click of a button to any event:

Easily add Travel Time before/after the event in 15 minute intervals in an intuitive interface

Every task in Motion has a duration and a "completed time" (so tasks can be partially completed). You can even break longer tasks into smaller pieces by enabling chunks. Pair that with automatic scheduling, and you'll see Motion's secret weapon in action, the AI at its core, that organizes your schedule like an executive assistant.

With that, Motion's time tracking is best used just to get a rough idea of how much time you spent on each task.

If you're looking to track time against work for invoicing purposes, Motion isn't quite there. In that case, we'd recommend pairing it with one of the best dedicated time tracking apps if you need to get super granular.

Motion is always a keyboard shortcut away ([OPT] + [c] to view the calendar, [OPT] + [a] to quickly access your meeting scheduler, and finally [OPT] + [SPACE] to quick-add a task from anywhere on your computer. These shortcuts are one of the reasons we love using Motion. Whether you're in the browser and need to check your availability quickly, are curious if you have any upcoming meetings and then want to get right back where you left off, or simply think of a task you need added (for yourself or your team member), it's all just one keyboard shortcut away.

In addition to the web app desktop app, 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.

A fun feature Motion recently added to the iOS app is being able to use Siri to create tasks while on-the-go. Simply ask Siri to "create a task in Motion to review that presentation ASAP" and it will pop it on our calendar, rearranging all your other tasks. Now they just need to bring the feature to Google Assistant users too!

The Motion project management tool on the mobile app is still in it's early phases. You can see your tasks in list view, but not on your kanban board for example. For this reason, we prefer to use the mobile app for tasks on the go but we prefer to use the desktop app and web app for project management and actually organizing projects/tasks and for getting work done.

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.

When comparing Motion's API with some of the leaders in project management like Asana, Motion does about 85% of what it needs to do for most integrations. We also know it'll get closer to 90–95% once they allow for custom fields, as functionality around "search tasks by custom field value" is surely to come with it.

The one thing to note though is that the API does not currently work with the appointment scheduling feature. For example, it does not allow for the same API functionality that a standalone scheduler (see in our Cal.com review), will give you on that front. That said, you can build some of this functionality by getting creative using a tool like Mailparser alongside Zapier (e.g. logging new appointments into your CRM upon booking), although I will say, it's not all that straightforward. 😅

All-in-all, Motion's API is getting there, and is likely to do what you'd need it to do on the project management front. We'd only say be aware if you're planning on building robust integrations based on their meeting scheduler, because if so, you might be better off using one of the best scheduler apps in that case instead.

Motion just released two native integrations, an email integration and Siri integration for the iOS mobile app.