When you add a task, you specify an urgency, time estimate, and what "schedule" it belongs to (e.g. work, personal, etc). Schedules are different categories with their own "slots" of time that a task can fill. You can also specify whether to use chunking, which lets the algorithm break a task into multiple events based on the "minimum chunk duration" you set for that task.
For example, let's say you create a 9-5 "schedule" for work. It's currently 3pm. You add two tasks:
- 3h, Task A, low priority, set min chunk duration to 1h
- 1h, Task B, high priority
Motion will schedule this as follows:
- 3-4pm today, Task B
- 4-5pm today, Task A
- 9-11am tomorrow, Task A
If you were to swap the urgencies, it will automatically reschedule those tasks (and any tasks that follow it, assuming they are marked as "auto-schedule")
Tbh the only problem is it's price. I use it quite a lot but I'm not sure I'll renew my annual subscription next month.
There's also Reclaim.ai, but I found Motion was faster to use and had a better UI
Those are the types of little time blocks I lose all the time because I can't switch fast enough, whereas if a tool could figure out my contexts well, it might really be able to surface things when I'm already in the right headspace.
It's not going to be perfect. Maybe Alice and Bob are part of the event for the next week too, because they're also on the company softball team with me and the tool wouldn't necessarily know we were actually meeting about the event, but even switching to the task of "review task list to choose a task I might be able to get done now" is one context shift too many when I have a short gap.
I was thinking more about the task side, where if I had come from a meeting about, say, marketing, and only had half an hour until another meeting, I might be able to knock out a marketing-related task because I was already in that headspace, whereas a similarly complex task about some other topic would require more of a context shift.
(I work at Notion but not on Calendar)
In fairness, I don't use Notion either, and wouldn't start for a calendar (I've tried, but I seem to be one of the odd people for whom Notion is radically, deeply unintuitive), so this particular switch wasn't on the table for me in the first place.
Until then the improvements are too small to be worth the time cost to switch.