What is a schedule?
A schedule is essentially a block of time used to assign a specific category of tasks and is one of the first things you will want to setup when getting started with Motion.
Imagine a full day with 24 hours, and within that day, you break it down into 4 hour blocks. Each of these blocks you have dedicated to specific types of tasks. The example structure below shows the break down of your day with sleep, work, and personal time blocks built out.
Example Day with Schedule blocks
12a – 4a: Sleep
4a – 8a: Personal Time
8a – 12p: Deep Work Time
12p – 4p: Admin/Meeting Time
4p – 8p: Family Time
8p – 12a: Sleep
Schedules can be as long or short as you would like, they are fully customizable. You can have as may of them as you would like as well.
How I leverage schedules in my current role
For me the single most valuable part of Motion is it’s ability to schedule and re-schedule tasks that need to get done around your static commitments like meetings and your child’s extra curricular events.
In my role I have to-do items that are created by own initiatives, project deliverables, support tickets (clients), and those random requests that come through Slack and e-mail. The amount of time it took to block out time on my calendar using the traditional time-blocking method was astronomical. I had an hour dedicated to do just this each Friday in preparation for the upcoming week. I would take my list of project tasks along with those last minute asks and manually create a calendar event in Outlook to dedicate time to get the work done. This caused massive scaleability issues, and didn’t allow for flexibility.
To remove this chaos, I started to leverage Motion to do all this for me. When an action item was added to my plate from a recent meeting I would add it as a task in Motion right away with a due date, task duration, and and the schedule that I want the task assigned to. This would block out time for that task automatically within the hours defined within that “schedule”.
With this specific example I have a week to get this task done. The “Meeting/Flex” schedule will assign this task between 11a – 3p each weekday until Sept. 9th. This is beautiful in so many ways.
First, this places the task on the calendar within Motion giving me a single pane of glass of my static calendar events AND my to-do list items like the one we just created.
Second, let’s say Motion initially blocked out time at 1p on Thursday, Sept 5th. This task would show up on my calendar giving me visibility into the work I need to get done on that day, during that time. There is no more questioning what I need to get done that day because it was already established. No more procrastinating, no more mental fatigue trying to determine what needs to get done.
The bonus here is that it also empowers me to say “no” if a colleague walks by my office asking me if I can help them out with something. Instead of saying “no”, which may come across as being non-collaborative or selfish of my time, I have a full view of my to-dos and meetings for the week. I can then provide the colleague with a timeframe that I am available to assist. From here I can create a to-do or formally schedule the time to help my colleague.
Well, what if that colleague turns out to be a client with an outage that I need to address? What happens to original task that was assigned? It will just get rescheduled on your calendar where space permits. When we created this task we allocated 45 minute of time to get it done. Our “Meeting/Flex” schedule will move the task on your calendar to the next available window within that schedule until it is done.
If you are still working on the client outage until 4p that day, it will take the task and move it to the next available day during the window that was established with that schedule. In this example, it would move it to Friday, Sept 6th at 11a.
If I was still time-blocking my tasks in Outlook, I would have had to move around my entire to-do list to ensure that I had this task scheduled to be done on time by Sept. 9th. Motion uses AI to move your to-do items around your schedule based on the information first defined in your to-do. This includes the due date, priority, schedule, etc.
Lastly, what happens if I wasn’t able to get the task done on time for my meeting on the 9th? If you have a hard deadline for a task, it will schedule time outside of the established window within that schedule to ensure you can get it done. So if the meeting is at 5p on Sept 9th, and your schedule was established from 11a – 3p, then it would schedule time for this task to be completed between 3p-5p that day, and push every other task you have scheduled to a different day.
Because this task had a hard deadline, anything else with flexible scheduling would then be pushed back to a different day or times. This, is the beauty of scheduling within Motion.
How to create schedules
Creating a schedule is extremely easy to do. Using the examples in the first section above, I will show you how to create a new “Personal Time” schedule based on the example in the first section.
So let’s imagine you want to dedicate the first four hours of your day to yourself. Family is sleeping and your colleagues and clients aren’t in the office yet. You determine this is the best chunk of time to spend on You.
From the settings menu, just navigate to “Schedules” > “New Schedule”. From here you can assign what days and times you want to use for this Schedule. Any tasks (personal or project) you assign to this chunk of time will be scheduled only within this time window.
Should I have more than one schedule?
For me I split it up based on particular types of work and then for times of the day. The schedules listed below are actual schedules from my personal Motion account.
There can be overlap with the schedules as well if you feel it’s needed.
Summary
I hope you get a lot out of this series of posts, my goal is to share my experiences with Motion in the IT industry and how it has helped provide me a realistic view of what I can get done with the finite amount of time we have each day.
Next we will go over task creation and how I leverage recurring tasks for routine work, and how I use what we learned here in this post to get those tasks done.
