Speaker 1: You wanted to know how we're using Motion, so today we're going to take you inside our Motion account and show you exactly how you can go from this to this. For context, myself and my business partner Alex run EfficientApp, a software review and comparison site, and we also make software videos just like this one. We have a remote team of five consisting of myself, Alex, a software engineer, a designer, and our video editor. And after seven years of using Asana, we made the tough decision to switch to Motion just when we saw how much easier it would be to manage our projects. Motion is not just a project manager, it helps us manage our time by automatically planning our day around our tasks, meetings, and personal events. It helps us better understand our availability, our work capacity, and it helps us stay on track with deadlines. In this video, we're going to be covering the first steps that you should take right now to set up Motion, how to leverage Motion so it feels like you actually have an assistant, the best way to use Motion as a team, and why we think they're changing the game when it comes to project management. And make sure you stay until the end of the video because we even dug around the Motion HQ dumpsters and may have found some Figma files with some unreleased features. The first thing you want to do is set up your Motion calendar, and you want to make your main calendar the one where you're going to set up most of your Motion tasks. So for me, that's my EfficientApp work calendar. Be sure to also add your personal calendar so nobody schedules any meetings over your yoga classes. I mean, that's me anyway. And don't worry, nobody's going to be able to see your personal events. With Motion, you can manage projects or individual tasks. So first, I'm going to show you how simple it is to add your first task. So you can hit Add Task in Motion, or if you're a keyboard shortcuts person, then hit Option Space or Alt Space on Windows. And remember the shortcut because you can use it to add tasks from anywhere in Motion. And if you have the desktop app installed, then anywhere on your computer. Then you want to set your priority for the task, the end date, the deadline, and also a start date if you don't want to start it for a while, and then duration, which is how long the task is going to take you. Now see this little auto-schedule toggle? Leave it on because that's your AI scheduler that's going to auto-schedule the task right on your calendar. And remember that term auto-schedule because it's going to come in handy later. Well done. This is the first step in leveraging Motion as your AI assistant. Now let's set up your projects. Go to the Projects tab and click on the plus sign to create a workspace. You want to think of workspaces as different departments, teams, or types of work that you need to get done. For example, here are some workspaces that we have that you might want to consider as well. We have a workspace for growth, aka marketing, customers, admin, customer support, and one for investing. Then you want to create projects relevant to each workspace. So for example, since we write and film software reviews at Efficient App, our projects are centered around different software categories that we're focusing on. And now that you have workspaces and projects set up, the next thing you want to do is set up statuses. Go to Settings and then click on each workspace to add statuses. And again, you want to think of statuses as the steps a project needs to go through from start to finish. To solidify this a little bit more, let us take you through an example of exactly how we use statuses. The majority of our growth projects involve either writing for our website or creating videos. So the statuses that work for our team are our to-dos, our researching and scripting, ready-to-edit, editing, reviewing, distribution launching, completed, backlog. Statuses can also represent different team members that are responsible for different parts of the project and moving it forward. But we're going to tell you more about flows when we get to the Figma files. For instance, while I'm mainly responsible for writing and scripting videos and filming, once I have all the footage ready, I'm going to move that task over to the next status, which is ready-to-edit, and then assign it to our video editor and also auto-schedule it so the task appears right on his calendar. This makes collaborating so much easier. Our video editor knows that I've done my part of the task and it's his turn to take over and it reduces those manual check-ins and status updates because it's all being done through motion. And of course, if you're using motion on your own and not as a part of a team, then still set up statuses because they're super powerful to help you move projects into completion. Speaking of tasks, you can also create reusable task and project templates for each workspace. For example, we have templates for new videos and blog posts, and it allows us to quickly create a more structured task that has pre-written details and subtasks outlined for each status that the task moves through. It's almost as if task templates allow you to create a structured process or workflow to move projects through. Wait a minute, workflow, flow, Figma files, hmm. And let's not forget about labels. Labels allow us to further categorize and group tasks within a workspace or project. For instance, we have labels for video and SEO content, partnerships, affiliate marketing, advertising, PR, you get the gist. The final step to setting up your projects is finalizing your views. To customize your views, go back to the projects tab. And when you get there, you might notice that the ordering of the statuses is a bit off. And if that happens, just drag your statuses in the right order. We like to set up our views by grouping by status, sorting by priority, toggling off the completed status, and then switching over to the Kanban view. The Kanban view just helps us visualize the projects from start to finish, and that's why we prefer it. Now when you're happy with your view, save the view as a new workspace view so the rest of your team can see it as well. It's just easier if you're all working off the same view. But if you do want to go a step further, you might also want to create a personal view, for example, for just the tasks that are assigned to you. All right, now let's talk about Motion's best feature. The feature that truly makes Motion stand out from all the other daily planners and project management tools out there, and the reason why we switched over to Motion after using Asana for seven years. And that's Motion's ability to schedule tasks right on your calendar. When you're adding tasks, whether it's from your calendar or your project section, you're going to have the ability to auto-schedule them. And this is what makes tasks appear right on your calendar, automatically adding time blocking to your day. It's also what enables Motion's AI to kick in, which automatically arranges your to-dos based on your priority, deadline, blocking of teammates, and even personal preferences like your work schedule. And this is the piece that we truly think is game-changing. Creating a task is super simple, especially if you have the desktop app, which we definitely recommend. You want to just hit Option Space if you're on a Mac or Alt Space if you're on Windows from anywhere, and then you can quickly add a task. And then again, from the task screen, search for any relevant workspace or project, set the priority, the deadline, and then Motion's AI will find the best time to schedule it on your calendar. And now this bit, I really appreciate because if you have a team member that's blocking you, what you can do is actually assign that task to them. And then guess whose calendar it's going to show up on? Theirs. When we used to do this in Asana, sure, you can assign a task to a team member, but you have to rely on them checking their email or having notifications turned on to make sure they actually see that, which often does get missed. But if your team members are checking their calendar multiple times a day and they see a task that you assign for them right on their calendar, it's much harder to miss. Another thing that we really appreciate about auto-scheduling is that it eliminates that what should I work on next feeling. We don't have to worry as much about blocking each other as teammates, missing deadlines, and if we overbook ourselves, Motion's also going to tell us that. And say you have a super busy day with an urgent task that comes up, you can just add the task to Motion, set the deadline as today with a hard deadline, and then Motion's going to automatically rearrange your schedule to make sure that you can get it done. Another way that I love to use Motion is on the go, and there's two ways that I do that. One through email and second through Siri. If I get an email and I want to take action on something in that email and it's going to take a bit more time, what I'll do is I'll forward that email to tasks at usemotion.com And I just say in plain text in the email, set the priority to medium and this is the deadline and that task is going to appear right on my calendar. It's literally like I am emailing my assistant. No joke. Or if I'm really on the go, I can just ask Siri to add a task to Motion straight from my phone. And then when I'm back at my desk, that task is scheduled right on my calendar. Now some important things to note. Once you get into using Motion daily, you might open up your current day and realize that some of the things that you set as high priority are no longer high priority. So you might want to rework some things and just know that totally happens and that's okay. If that happens, you don't want to manually drag the tasks around because that's going to lock them into Motion. Instead, what you want to do is just change the priority and just like you would tell your assistant, hey, this is high priority, this is low priority, this is medium priority. You can do that with Motion and it will automatically rearrange your tasks for you. With that, sometimes you may not want to follow Motion's plan hour by hour and that's totally okay. In that case, what I do is I just hit start task on the task that I actually want to work on that Motion schedules for later and then Motion will readjust your schedule. Okay, now say I have an emergency and I'm pulled away from my desk. That's totally okay. I can just ignore Motion entirely. And then when I come back to work at my desk, the schedule will already be rearranged for me. We used to have to do this manually all the time when using Asana. Speaking of your schedule, Motion also has a meeting scheduler that you'll want to set up. It'll come in super handy because it takes into account your personal and work availability and even other team members availability if you want to have some shared booking links. Before Motion, we were actually using Calendly. So when we started using Motion, it eliminated our need for Calendly altogether because now Motion takes care of all of our booking needs. And now that you know how to use Motion for individual tasks and projects, let's talk about how to use it as a team. We previously had all of our long-term projects in Asana. And what we did when we made the decision to start using Motion was instead of trying to move over every single task from Asana, we just had a date when from that date moving forward we started only adding projects and tasks to Motion. We specifically focused on making sure to immediately move over at least one to two weeks worth of tasks into Motion so that we can start really relying on it in the day to day. This made the migration from Asana to Motion so much easier because we did it one week at a time with the projects that were top of mind. The craziest part is that we realized just how many unnecessary tasks we had accumulated in Asana over the years. By starting clean, we started asking ourselves, is this important to actually move over to Motion or can a group of tasks actually become a project? So we found that we actually cleaned up a lot of our projects and consolidated a lot as well. Don't be afraid to treat your old tasks like Marie Kondo, give them thanks and appreciation for being there, but also let them go if they no longer are actually helpful. Starting with a fresh, clean slate and being more intentional when using Motion will allow you to see the true power of it. Another huge reason why we made the change from Asana to Motion was capacity planning. It never made sense to us that one of the most well-known project management tools, or actually all the project management tools out there aside from Motion, don't take into account an individual or team's time outside of that tool. Like come on, let's do a reality check here. No one's time is reflected accurately in a siloed project management tool. All of our time is filled with meetings, sometimes a lot of meetings, appointments, personal events, and then also the tasks in our project management tool. So how can you say that you can accurately have capacity planning when none of these tools are actually taking into account all of those other things I just mentioned? All these other tools are missing half the picture because sure, you can assign to me 40 hours of work, but if I have 20 hours of meetings, I'm not going to be able to actually manage my workload. With Motion being so tied into your calendar at the core, it's always going to know your team's true availability, both work and personal availability. Let's take an example of an actual scenario where capacity planning came in handy. Last week, I assigned a task to Alex, and I said that it needed to be done by Friday because it was blocking me, but on Friday, Alex had a dentist appointment and a couple calls scheduled. So instead, Motion scheduled the task for him on Thursday, and that's what allowed him to actually complete it by the time that I needed it to get done. So think about how something like that can impact your team on a larger scale when we're not just talking about a week in advance, but months in advance as well. Capacity planning becomes predictive, and Motion can tell you if your team is overloaded or if reaching that three-week deadline is actually realistic. This allows us to focus on getting our work done while Motion can figure out when the best time for us to do that work is. And when things fall off track, as they often do, Motion will warn us and will also rearrange everyone's schedule, making sure that we don't miss a deadline. So when Alex started using Motion personally and he saw how powerful it is, he wanted to roll it out to the rest of the team. And when we adopted it, it really felt like we had hired a part-time project manager. Whereas when we were using Asana, it felt like one of us had to always step in and be a part-time project manager. And all of that is why we think Motion is totally changing the game when it comes to project management. Now, if you're planning on onboarding your team, what we recommend is you set up the bare bones of Motion, your workspaces, your projects, everything that we've showed in this video so far, and then you want to record a Loom video for them and give them some basic training of what they can expect when they come into Motion. You want to teach them some of the basics like how to add a task, how to auto-schedule, why Motion's valuable and why you chose it for your team, and also give them a tour of your workspaces and projects. And you also want to let them know that when they are needed, just like we showed earlier, when the task is assigned to them, it will automatically show up on their calendar just as long as it's auto-scheduled. And if it isn't clear already, all of this is why your teams will get used to checking Motion more frequently, because if they're using it as their calendar, they're going to get used to seeing tasks that appear on their calendar, and it really becomes a habit. Okay, and now for the Figma files that we found in the Motion HQ dumpsters.

Speaker 2: Okay, Alex here to go through the Figma files. Something that we were seeing in our comment section for our other Motion videos are that a lot of you want Gantt charts. We hear you. Sounds like Motion hears you as well. What does this look like? That looks like Gantt charts to me. Okay, so what Motion is able to do differently here with Gantt charts is that because they actually have your team's workload, when they have meetings and what tasks they have assigned and priority of tasks, they can actually go a layer deeper. So you have a project that's due two weeks from now, but hey, the people that are working on the team are tied up for three weeks. So you're not going to be able to get that done in two weeks, and it can flag that for you. And that becomes super apparent because you can actually see people's availability tied in and that takes into account their meetings and everything. This is one of those areas where we're actually seeing Motion go a layer deeper than what other software can do because they're actually pulling in the time management into the task management and deadlines. Okay, so it also looks like Motion is going to be adding custom fields. Super stoked about this because there's a bit more structured data that we want to actually be using in some instances. So it looks like you can add dropdowns, date fields, text fields, number fields, all the normal stuff that you expect, and even some connect fields. Okay, so we saw Gantt and custom fields. Those are things that you know that you want. What we're seeing here is something that we didn't even know that we wanted. So flows is what they're calling it, and it looks like that you can essentially turn a task into a process. So how we were explaining earlier where you'll set up a task and statuses for that task and you move the task through the statuses, well, you'd have to manually assign the tasks to change the deadline, change the duration. Okay, so when flows are enabled, it's literally like a task turns into a process. So the task is on your calendar the same way as every other task is on your calendar. But when you mark it as complete, it will actually move the status to the next status that the task needs to go through, and along with that, it assigns it to the appropriate team member, throws it on their calendar, and then actually sets the duration of that. So you're just doing the same thing that you were doing before, marking tasks complete, but now it's going to automatically assign to team members and jump back to you when you need to work on it. So the way to think about flows is when there's a repeatable process that you have where maybe a task ultimately needs to jump between you and a different team member. This will actually just turn all of that into a single task that jumps between you automatically. Right now, for example, we're filming this video and the task is sitting in the status of film video. So right now, what I would do is I would change the status to the next stage, which is ready to edit, and then I would have to change the assignee to be our editor. And then from there, well, what's the duration of this task? I don't know. The edit's going to take, I think, four hours, something like that. So flows let you transform a normal task into a process-sized task, essentially. Instead of changing the status of the task, you just mark the task as complete, and it's going to automatically assign to the right team member, the right duration, and the deadline. All this stuff that we were doing manually before is now just going to be part of our process and automated with flows. Okay, so it looks like you're also going to be able to do more long-term planning with motion, and motion will support more layers to further manage your projects, like milestones, subtasks, and all of that, in addition to the workspaces and projects and tasks that you currently have. They should help managers manage managers manage managers. So that's it for the Figma files. Back to Andra. Now you need to come in from that direction.

Speaker 1: All right, that was fun. If you're already using motion, then you're already going to know this, but if you're new here, you're going to very quickly see how fast Motion's team releases features. So the motion that you see today is probably going to look a tad different than the motion that you'll see in several months, and trust me, it's only getting better. So now that you've watched this video, there's only one thing left to do, and that's to jump right back at the beginning of the video, watching it through as you set up motion, and pausing along as you need it. And if you're not using Motion yet, then what are you waiting for? Jump down into the description link and grab yourself a seven-day free trial. And make sure you use our affiliate link, because once your seven-day free trial is over and you become a Motion customer, you will also be eligible to receive our three-part Motion course, teaching you even more about how to set up Motion for success. Thanks for your time and attention. We'll see you in the next video.