So what exactly is Motion? Well, it's a tool that uses AI and automation to schedule your tasks and meetings, helping to plan your day and prioritize the important things with the ultimate aim to make you as productive as possible and give you a to-do list that will help you achieve this.

When you visit the UseMotion site you'll be greeted with the stat of Motion increasing your productivity by 137% which is great and we can see that it certainly could be the case for a lot of people.

The core features of Motion

The Motion tool which is available on the UseMotion website has five core features that can help you become more productive, you may find you only use some of them or you might use them all, either way, they should increase your productivity.

As a whole, think of Motion as project management tools mixed with task management, auto scheduling and your personal calendar. All mixed in with AI to help you focus time on important tasks, not miss deadlines and make your work life more efficient.

Intelligent Calendar

We know what you're thinking 'I've already got a calendar' but the intelligent calendar that Motion has is a level up. It knows exactly what you should do by learning the importance of tasks (which you can also teach it) meaning it will prioritize those important ones for you to do.

The app also helps remind you of deadlines, so you'll never have one of those moments where you suddenly realize you're 10 minutes late to a Zoom call or that the deadline you thought was next week is actually tomorrow.

Don't worry if you have a schedule that often changes, if you suddenly need to jump on a call, do something else, add a new task and so forth, the calendar can use its automatic scheduling to rebuild the schedule.

Of course, it also has all of the other features of a calendar you'd expect as well as allowing you to see your daily schedule in one click and access it from within browsers, on your phone or on the desktop app.

Automatic Task Manager

The Motion app aims to re-invent what you'd traditionally think a 'To-Do' list is, its Automatic task management lets you create and edit tasks in seconds, schedule recurring tasks and ultimately will automatically build a to-do list for you. All of this can be done from any of the apps, be it mobile or desktop or the browser app.

As with any tool, this way of creating a to-do list will take a little time to get used to, but once you've done it a few times we found that the end result is a more comprehensive to-do list that automatically includes the recurring tasks which saved us time.

Automatic Project Manager

Even if you think you've already got your calendar, schedule and to-do list sorted, you may want to consider using Motion for the automatic project management feature.

This helps not only you but your team be as productive as possible as well as stay on track when it comes to larger and more complex projects that you need to work on. It will automatically schedule and prioritize tasks for everyone on the team as well as see how many hours were spent on the task as well as on meetings related to it.

You can view all of the tasks and projects you have in either a traditional list view or a Kanban view (for those who like a more visual view and to sort by priority) and all information relating to the project such as notes, comments, attachments and so on can be kept in one place.

Meeting Scheduler

Much like the most famous of meeting scheduler tools Calendly, Motion allows you to send a link out to people to book a time in your calendar, a super useful feature for you if you are either busy or want to stop spending time going back and forth with people to find a date and time that works for both of you.

You can block out times and days or simply put preferences for when you want meetings. For example, if you prefer to get all of your meetings done at the start of the day you can set it so people can only book mornings between say 9-11am.

By default, Motion will try and schedule meetings back to back as they have found this to be the most effective way for people to work with less interruptions during focus time.

Integrations

As we've come to expect with tools and software, Motion integrates with a variety of popular tools to make it easy for you to 'integrate' into your work life as well as power up their offering as a whole. They currently integrate with the following apps:

• Google Calendar - the ability to manage meetings and events from within Motion that sync with this
• Gmail - Send meeting reminders and rescheduling requests from within your email app
• Zoom, Teams & Meet - Syncs together and allows you to schedule and join your meetings from Motion
• Outlook - syncs with your app
• Zapier - Use Zaps to make Motion even more powerful

Motion App Pricing

Your time is precious, so we're always big advocates for tools that genuinely make you more productive and save you time but pricing is still important.

Motion pricing is split into two plans, one for individuals priced at $19 per month if billed annually or $34 if billed monthly or a Team plan which is $12 per user per month (annually) or $20 if monthly.

This pricing in our opinion is quite fair for the offering that they have, the one thing we're not huge fans of is the disparency between annual and monthly plans. Generally, if you bill monthly it's around 10-25% more expensive than choosing annually, but with Motion it's nearly double the price.

Motion App Free Trial

If you're thinking of trying out this app then Motion do offer a 7 day free trial, a relatively short trial compared to SaaS companies in general but just about enough time to give you an idea whether this is going to work for you or if it's not.

You will need to enter your credit card (or debit) details in order to start the free trial and you'll also need to select whether you want a monthly or annual plan once the trial comes to an end. As mentioned above the difference in monthly vs annual plans is quite substantial!

Motion Pros

• Automatic scheduling - When you get used to how it automatically creates and plans the schedule for you and embrace it, then it becomes a great tool to help increase your productivity.
• Rescheduling - for most people, there are days when everything changes and rather than having to spend time re-organizing your whole calendar and to-do list, the AI does this for you in seconds, super handy!
• Price - It's really good value starting from just $12 per month for teams and $19 as an individual, even if it saves you an hour a month it's arguably worth it
• Synching & integration - the ability to hook it up to your apps you already use means it can speed up the setup and make it easy to start using in your day to day life

Motion Cons

• For the already somewhat organized - if you're someone who never uses to-do lists or a calendar then this may be too much of a change, we're not saying to rule it out but you may be best starting with a more simple to-do list app
• Monthly vs Annual pricing - There's quite a difference in pricing between opting for monthly or yearly, so if you prefer paying monthly it may be a hard pill to swallow and may force you to go annual. Not an issue if you don't mind paying for things on an annual basis.

Setting up Motion

When you sign up to Motion, you'll be prompted to start the setup and this is all quite intuitive. You'll first be asked to connect any accounts that you currently use such as Google Calendar, Outlook etc which will then sync together. This was straightforward and worked straight away for us with no issues.

Next, you'll be asked to set up some default information, such as your working hours, and times of the day you want to set aside to certain types of projects, tasks, meetings and so on. This is a powerful feature so don't overlook it, block times when you know you need to concentrate on certain areas and have a good think about setting specific times for specific things in your life.

Artificial Intelligence

So how good is the AI that Motion has when it comes to automating, scheduling and making your work life more productive? From our experience, pretty good! As you'd expect from a Motion app review where one of the main selling points of the tool is AI, this plays a big part in the tool itself.

The app uses AI and a mix of the priority you set for the tasks as well as the length and any deadlines attached to it to add it to your calendar/schedule. We saw it do a good job of this, initially, we had to move some things around due to personal preferences and information which it has no chance of knowing but after we did this the schedule was quite effective for us. It was interesting as it was laid out differently than what we would typically do but actually made for a refreshing change.

You can adapt the entries and make sure certain tasks have minimum times added to them i.e if you have a certain project that always needs a minimum of an hour of work at a time you can tell it this.

Once it shows you your schedule you can re-order it based on priorities, deadlines and so forth to make it work for you.

When you start working through your tasks and your general project management as a whole, the AI will work in hand and prompt you when new tasks should start, allow you to snooze tasks, amend and reschedule your calendar if you miss a task and essentially act as an assistant who changes your diary on a minute by minute basis.

Our Verdict

We really like the Motion app, if you devote some time in setting it up (don't rush!) and start using it and accept that it may take a few days or a week to get both used to it and for the tool to start working as it's meant to do before you'll really see the power of the app.

If you take one thing from this Motion app review then be it that the tool is there to aid your life rather than do everything for you. You'll always still need to create tasks, add personal projects, work hours, and so forth yourself (unless they're recurring)

You have to trust the app to a certain extent that it will schedule your tasks in a way to make you more productive and this may not be the way you would do it yourself.

Price-wise, at $12 a month for teams and $19 for individuals it's not a big outlay and even if you use it purely for the calendar booking link then it's worth it for that alone if you're spending money on Calendly already. The 7-day trial should be longer, to allow you to fully understand if it's right for you but we think for 90% of people this is enough time to see if it's right.

Ultimately, there's no better way than to try it out for yourself and see if this project management tool fits in with your working ways.