The Machines Are Organizing Us: Motion and the Future of Workflow

For those of you who didn’t read my first article about Motion.

Motion is an AI system that manages your day for you. It connects your inbox, calendar, and task lists, then schedules your life automatically. When it works, it feels like magic. When it doesn’t, it’s like a scene out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. The trick is setup: clean integrations, clear data, and one source of truth. Done right, Motion transforms chaos into control. Done wrong, it just automates the chaos.

The Rise of the Self-Organizing Workday

There is a new class of tools that want to manage your time, not just remind you what to do. They actively build your schedule, move your tasks, and tell you when you are behind.

Motion is one of the loudest names in that space. It blends project management, calendaring, and AI to create what feels like a living assistant. It syncs your email, to-do lists, and meetings into one system and then dynamically packs your schedule based on priorities and deadlines.

You can watch your day rearrange itself to make room for what matters, in real time.

The Integrations Game

These systems succeed or fail based on integrations. If your Google Workspace or Outlook setup is messy, Motion will inherit that mess. Automated mess. Yay. Bring me some of that. 

Clean your calendar architecture first. Know which account owns what. Make sure that “busy” and “free” actually mean something. Apple’s iCal does not handle availability flags the same way Google or Outlook does, and that mismatch can break everything.

Once the pipes are clean, Motion runs beautifully. How are your pipes? 

Motion’s Growing Pains

Motion is powerful, but it still feels like an engineer’s playground. Tiny fonts and crowded panels make it easy to get lost. Monday, for example, hides what you do not need and slides out more detail when you ask for it. Motion shows everything at once and it’s a bit overwhelming in the way that AI tools seem to amplify right now. 

To their credit, the team updates constantly. Every day I see, “Click here to refresh, we just pushed an update.” That is the new software reality: features evolve in real time. It is exciting and occasionally maddening.

Your Calendar Is Your Nervous System

What Motion really changes is how you think about your calendar. It turns a static record of appointments into an active decision-maker.

Your calendar stops being storage and becomes intelligence. It looks at your tasks, your deadlines, and even your energy patterns if you train it well. Then it repacks your day automatically. 

Digital Housekeeping Comes First

Every automation project eventually becomes a housekeeping project.

You think you are getting more efficient, but you discover that most inefficiency comes from old junk: forgotten inboxes, orphaned tasks, and duplicated calendars. Motion shines a bright light on all of it.

1. Clean before you connect.
2. Connect before you automate.

That sequence matters more than any setting in your dashboard.

When AI Actually Helps

When Motion is trained correctly, it starts predicting your behavior. It learns how long tasks take, when you hit flow, and when you need a break. That is when it starts feeling like an assistant instead of an overlord. AI tools do not replace discipline. They amplify it, and that’s sometimes oppressive, but in a very ironically liberating sort of way. 

One Calendar to Rule Them All

Cross-platform scheduling is where good intentions go to die. Google and Outlook understand “busy” as an availability flag. Apple’s iCal expects you to figure it out yourself. Mix them together and your availability becomes meaningless.

Pick one calendar system and stick with it.
Let that be your single source of truth. Motion works best when there is one clear brain making the calls. I’m an Apple-only shop for all intents and purposes but we’ve selected the Google Workspace platform to manage emails, calendars, and file sharing. Why? EVERYTHING syncs to Google Calendar – all of the tools we use: Tidio, Calendly, HubSpot, Motion, Monday, etc. etc. Apple Calendar? Not so much. Also, I have a lot of clients who are Windows-only shops and they don’t grumble so much when I present them with a Google event link or a Google Drive share URL. They do tend to bristle if I sent them an Apple event invitation or even Dropbox links.  

Final Thoughts

Tools like Motion are changing how we think about productivity. We are moving from static systems to dynamic ones, from manual workflows to adaptive ones. That shift is both exciting and exhausting. Once your tools become this intelligent, they do not just reflect your habits; they expose them.

Here’s your takeaway: Before you hand your day to the machines, do the groundwork.
Clean your data. Simplify your systems. Choose one source of truth.

Then let Motion handle the logistics so you can focus on the work that actually matters.

I will also say that as soon as Monday does the calendar scheduling thing that Motion does I will be off of Motion. It’s amazing for now and it will only get better. 

Also, I haven’t even gotten into the AI Employees aspect of Motion, which they talk a lot about. The reason for this is that there are a lot of platforms doing this same sort of work and I’m having a lot of trouble finding any decent support materials that talk about how to best configure and optimize their AI Employees, (they’re just agents – let’s get beyond the cutesy marketing spin) so I’m only just using the out-of-the-box functionality that a few of them have until I can find the time to dig in more deeply. 

If you want to try Motion (and you should) use my affiliate link here. I love the platform and I wish I’d started using it a year ago. 

Cheers,
Chris