Seeing time with my eyeballs
And also admitting I don't know fractions
In my never ending search to re-build my dead husband out of apps, I finally signed up for Motion. If you aren't getting absolutely bombarded by their ads on social media, congratulations, you must be on a different algorithm train.
It always bothers me a little when an ad simply succeeds in pelting me enough times that I admit defeat and take action, but in my defense, the kicker really was a writer friend (who also has ADHD) talking about how great the app was and how well it was working for her.
There aren't very many AI powered schedulers of the type that can automatically plan your day and automatically shift your tasks around when you forget you had a dentist appointment. Motion is one, Skedpal, Reclaim, Focuster, and FlowSavvy are the others I looked at.
When choosing apps, I look at pricing, features, and then usually make a fairly rash decision based on how the app feels. I am basically a nightmare customer.
For whatever reason, I liked the feel of Motion best. It isn't particularly cheap but I'm hoping if it continues helping me with productivity, it will pay for itself. She says, with an incredible amount of optimism undimmed by a long history of this kind of plan hardly ever working out.
One of the things I have long hated about schedulers is that it asks you how much time a task will take. How the hell am I supposed to know? I forget what day it is and would regularly forget to pick Ben up from school without the twenty seven alarms and pop up notifications to remind me.
Motion also requires you to estimate tasks for time, but! It allows you to set a soft or hard deadline and the app will break up a longer task into chunks automatically. So if I think, for example, it will take me four hours to write a newsletter, and set a soft deadline for the weekend, it'll chunk it up for me like so:
The red line means I'm in that task right now, on this lovely (rainy) Tuesday afternoon. Since I have absolutely no idea whether or not it will actually take me that much time, once I'm finished, I can mark the task as complete, and LIKE MAGIC, the schedule will resort itself with all the new-found time that just opened up. Whee!
If I miss a task altogether, it will automatically shift it to the next opening. Sometimes this means it gets scheduled after my idealistic deadline. It will alert me and I can tell it to bump something else so I can finish it earlier, or accept the new deadline.
The other thing I am liking is that I can create different projects and organize my tasks under each project. For work projects, I can tell the app to only schedule those during my set work hours. For adulting crap like cleaning out the shop or re-organizing the garage, I can set those projects to schedule on the weekends or after work if I have spoons (I rarely have spoons). Neat.
It syncs with Google Calendar, which I am admittedly not super great at using consistently, but sorted out how to make it automagically appear in my Shift email window (handy!) and am making a stab at updating it. (Shift is dreamy for managing multiple gmail accounts. You can also manage domain based email accounts if you first sync them with gmail.)
So IF I update Google Calendar regularly, Motion will block out the time I am busy AND, as a side benefit, alert me to this kind of nonsense I am often guilty of:
Hi. I'm the problem, it's me. Therapy is located 30 minutes south of my house. Sleep Clinic appointment is located 30 minutes north of my house. I cannot be in two places at once, nor can I feasibly attempt to make one appointment and then race to the second one.
*Note: Because my brain works the way it does, I have to block out the travel time needed for the appointment, not just the time of the appointment. For therapy, I need to leave my house at 1:15 to drive to the school (15 minutes because we live in the sticks & I invariably get stuck behind a bus) where I will pick up Ben at 1:30, then drive the remaining 25 minutes into town and (this is important), all the way to the door of the therapist's office. Plus parking, plus walking in, plus waiting behind other people to check in, etc, etc, etc.
SO MANY people say, "Oh, it's only 15 minutes away." Cute. That's cute for you. Maybe it's 15 minutes from freeway onramp to freeway exit ramp. Maybe you aren't in a long standing fight with time. Maybe it doesn't take your middle school several minutes to call down a kid, even when you call to excuse them in advance.
But for me, to leave my garage, pick up Ben, and arrive on time, it is FORTY+ FORKING MINUTES. The actual appointment for Ben is from 2:00-2:45. Why I didn't add in the travel-home time, I cannot tell you. Because my brain is an exciting garden of vole tunnels and sink holes. (Probably because I'm more worried about being on time than I am about the drive home.)
ANYWAY. So that oops scheduling two overlapping appointments is now a thing I can correct because I can see it with my eyeballs!
This seeing time thing reminds me of the day I came home from school and found my mom teaching my younger siblings fractions with one of these fraction circles.
I lost my mind. Are you kidding me? There's a way to SEE that 3/4ths is bigger than 2/3rds? (I had to google if 3/4ths really is bigger than 2/3rds because dyscalculia is real and I do not have these little fraction wheel things in front of me). I practically had an out of body experience holding the little 1/4 chip up to all the other pieces.
Right, so it has been like that. Motion is helping me visualize time better, and that feels pretty magical.
And check it out! I did NOT need four hours to write and send this. Huzzah!