Motion: How to supercharge your Calendar

Motion is a chrome extension that offers to provide a streamlining option to reduce the complexity surrounding calendars and working around calendars. It offers a whole host of features and capabilities that seem so obvious, but are lacking in the current options. This makes Motion an incredibly exciting company to follow.

Motion essentially acts as a chrome extension that offers an incredibly streamlined process to handle everything for your calendar, from scheduling meetings, finding time with others, managing your invites, moving meetings around or even pinging your meeting attendees when you're late. With its plethora of keyboard shortcuts, you are able to move much faster than the typical clients available.

From a very high level, Motion seems to be the Superhuman of the calendar. Email and Calendar both represent table stakes of the modern work environment, and their goal is to provide the most efficient, and productive system to manage these features.

Very specifically, Motion highlights a number of specific pain points:

Right before a meeting, I’ve always felt a small level of anxiety. The problem is, once I get 10 to 20 tabs in deep work, I often lose where the calendar is. Then, I find myself rapidly scrambling to try to find the calendar in order to identify the zoom meeting link.

With Motion, the button will hover inconspicuously on your platform. Instead of scrambling to open up google calendar, you will immediately find the button to join the meeting right on your desktop.

This is huge. Just this feature alone is worth looking into the company, and to try it out

Another major way they tackle the pain points is by trying to solve the meeting availability problem. Internally, it’s always easy to find times to meet with other colleagues. However, it becomes much more complicated when I don’t have access to someone’s calendar, particularly when they are external. Solutions like Calendly can work in the short-term, but it can seem impersonal.

Motion gives a very easy, sleek way of identifying all of the available times at once.

Overall, what makes this company unique is the new approach to something old and outdated. People don’t think of calendars as spaces for innovation, until they see it in action. I’m not familiar with many other major companies that are also tackling this specific space.

The best way to think about Motion is that it is part of this new cohort of “Extreme Productivity for mundane tool X”. The biggest example of this is Superhuman, but there is a lot of opportunity for this.

The target market for this type of product is very niche. The market likely consists of people that don’t like wasting time. For them, moving from one tab to the calendar tab is just a drag of time. In addition, they are incredibly interested in productivity. They want to ensure that they are maximizing the efficiency of their time. Finally, they get super annoyed whenever they are slowed down. Given the limitations of the calendar, there are a lot of opportunities to get slowed down. What kind of people do this? Probably people who are young tech people, executives, generally very busy people.

Would I use this?

Hell yeah! Only one issue though - I tried to use the product, and unfortunately, I can’t use it for my company’s email. If it became available, I would use it immediately.