Motion app - Project and Task App Review

Motion is an tasks and project management application that comes on all common platforms with this review having been done on IOS and web clients. The testing was done over the course of a year and using a self-purchased license.

What does it do - Getting things done?

Motion is an application that sets itself as a project, and task management application. It’s one of a range of applications that seeks to manage projects for you and a team of people. This is done in some ways like other applications like these. You as the owner need to input projects, create the tasks that make up the project, set up things like priorities and time projects to complete the tasks.  This is common with a range of task managers like notion, or Quire or similar.

Where Motion gets is critical edge is the assigning of tasks to a common calendar for you or a project team. This means that by importing existing calendars (Apple iCloud, MS Exchange, Google) or setting up a calendar with tasks and meetings Motion will place the tasks that need doing in the order they need doing, into your calendar.

This means it will see a two-hour block of time in your calendar between meetings and put in a range of tasks that take two hours that need doing based on the setting you have set to each task.

This means that you’ll find your calendar stuffed in the quiet moments between appointments, with the next key task that needs doing in the order that the various projects have them aligned.

As you complete the tasks and mark them completed in Motion the project will be updated and the next tasks or dependencies will unlock to assign to the next visible available slot.

Motion has a full range of notification available and can be used by a team that is working collectively. On project creation tasks can be assigned to individuals or teams that can be created.  The time used on each task can be recorded as well upon completion.

In practical terms if the Motion projects are maintained and updated you’ll never be in doubt of what to do next when your calendar is free as Motion will consistently feed you new tasks. All the while maintaining and updated the calendar as new meetings come in or go. Work not completed will be flagged as having passed deadlines and can be reviewed across a range of projects.

Working with Motion

The application works well on iOS and on Mac desktop, and one of the key elements of this app, and many like it is data entry. Like with many projects, task tracking applications you have a heavy upfront and ongoing workload to input and update the data in the application. It’s the core of these tools that by their very nature you must organize, structure, and enter a whole range of data about projects tasks, workloads, sequence, and like get any benefit from them. Then when it’s uploaded maintain the ongoing data volume by maintaining progress and entry to keep the data there intact, and usable.

To enter data in Motion I found not too difficult after a bit of playing around with the application, with the range of settings and fields needed to set up, configure a task, assign, and order with dependencies and similar. I did find it very repetitive if you had many of complex tasks with large projects requiring a lot of setting of fields to ensure the tools assigned properly. It’s a lot of work to set up a project, and each task with the necessary fields to ensure proper the real benefit of Motion, which is the push of tasks.

Assigning of tasks by pushing them to your calendar and notification is the secret sauce of Motion and the reason I spent my own money on the application and the process works. You will get pushed the next task, and you’ll never have a quiet moment as each day will auto populate for you the tasks in order across every moment in your calendar you let Motion fill. 30-minute tasks will fill every minute you let it and you have the option to configure blocks of time or start and stop times for the tasks to populate and this works well.

Do the thing.  

The challenge I had with working with Motion really came down to me and my own personal work process. Two reasons made this not really work for me and they are entirely on me. The first was the front heavy data entry tasks that I had to input all the information about every task, workload, dependency and similar into Motion to have Motion then tell me to do the thing.  The time it tasks to tell Motion about many of my tasks was ironically often about the same some of the tasks would have taken to do in the first place.  This part sat with me often as I was entering comparatively small tasks into Motion to be reminded 30 min later to do that same 5 min task.  This niggled me too often avoid putting tasks into Motion that were of a given size or weight making me have post it notes and Motion in parallel.

Secondly was the fact that being an individual person with a range of different things going on I didn’t find myself able to work on Motions method. The notifications were too easy to ignore and often I found myself doing things in a different order then I had told Motion I needed to do them in when I originally set up the project weeks before.

Summary

I found working like Motion wanted me to work was not in a flow that I naturally do and have since recognized I’m more a pen and paper person.

Motion wasn’t for me. And I think therefore the person it’s for will be someone either with a team project need to manage multiple complex long-term tasks and scopes. With multiple resources and assignments and a common project plan being of strong value while Motion pushes tasks to aligned resources based on availability making it a very sexy narrative.

However, for the individual contributor it’s cracking walnuts with a hammer.  

My final recommendation for Motion and all apps like this, improve and refine the data entry/management task. It bleeds more time in my case then it can add.