Motion vs Reclaim – Which AI Calendar Works Best for You

SetupConfusion

I’ll be honest — the setup on both Motion and Reclaim immediately made me open at least five support tabs 😅. Neither tool makes it totally intuitive unless you already know what terms like “task weighting” or “calendar sync priority” means. And they both start suggesting events *before* you finish onboarding, which completely threw me (I had an old calendar that got pulled in and all my dinner reservations from six months ago got slotted at top priority — cool).

On Motion, the first thing it aggressively recommends is importing your tasks. But from where? Asana? GCal? Tana? There’s no obvious decision tree — and it just prompted me to paste them in manually. Huh. Also, their time-blocking setup uses their own terminology, so instead of “flexible”, you get options like “Smart” and “Manual override,” which doesn’t really explain anything.

Reclaim wins slightly here because it treats setup more like a walkthrough, and you can preview what it’s doing *as* you click through. It sniffs out your work hours, existing calendar, and tasks with a quick permissions setup — and then offers suggestions you can tweak before turning it all on. But even there, I had to Google what “Habits” were supposed to be vs. “Tasks” (short version: habits recur, tasks don’t).

DailySchedulingStyle

This is where Motion shows its teeth. It’s opinionated — in a good way *and* an annoying way. You tell it what you need to do, and it will carve out time across your calendar, moving things around like a chess engine. It’s great if you’re the type of person who always underestimates how long deep work takes and ends up eating lunch at 4.

But… it can be *too* smart. I added a task due Friday, and it blocked out time Monday morning. I had no meetings and lunch was open — ideal time, right? I changed the due date to Wednesday, but it still kept it on Monday 🤔. Later I found out: Motion adds “urgency penalty” the later you drag a task. So it thinks *you’re* the problem, not the calendar.

Reclaim is gentler. It treats meetings as sacred and only nudges your focus time around them. It shows a “soft-lock” for events it picked, so you can still move them, but it won’t override meetings unless you say so. And you can visually set priorities by dragging and re-ordering tasks inside its task list — sort of like a Trello board that actually controls your calendar.

IntegrationsAndWeirdBugs

Oh wow, this is where I fell into the integration hell vortex 😬. Motion claims to integrate with Notion, GCal, Outlook, Slack — but Slack never worked for me. I connected my workspace and… nothing. No DMs. No updates. I reconnected three times, and still nothing. Turns out they *used* to support Slack notifications but quietly deprecated that feature. The button is just still there 🙃.

Also, Motion’s Notion integration is bizarre. It can pull tasks from a database, sure, but only if every task has a due date. And if any cell is empty or formatted wrong (like a status column that’s really a tag field), it breaks silently and imports only half the tasks. No error message. Just… less stuff.

Reclaim has fewer integrations, but the ones it has work more cleanly. Google Calendar is the core — and integration with Asana actually honors due dates AND subtasks. What shocked me was how good the sync delay was. I would edit something in Asana, and within 10 seconds, it reshuffled my calendar. Sometimes *twice* — it briefly picked a slot, then changed its mind. But at least that was better than no feedback.

Heads-up though: Reclaim doesn’t support Apple calendar at all. So if you’re using iCloud, there’s a pretty hard limitation there. It *can* sync a calendar over from there if you mirror it through Google, but I tried that and it ended in duplicate events and chaos.

FocusTimeAndOverbooking

Motion really wants you to get work done. To the point where it will declare war on your free time. I had a dentist appointment show up in my personal calendar — and Motion rescheduled a writing task *over it* because it wasn’t on my work calendar. So apparently, cavities don’t count as priority 😶.

The other thing is Motion doesn’t protect lunch hours unless you set them *explicitly* as recurring events. There’s no intelligent “person probably eats at noon” automation. And I learned this the hard way after it stacked three unrelated 90-minute sessions from consecutive tasks right through my usual lunch break. Kinda brutal.

Reclaim, though, has a different vibe. You can set “buffer time” after meetings, define habits for personal stuff like walking the dog, or even protect the golden 5pm-6pm as sacred zone. Also, Reclaim color-codes your calendar: blue for tasks, purple for habits, and grey for private. So even if it reschedules something, you visually never lose context.

What I liked: Reclaim will shoot a Slack message (if set) with your top three tasks for the day plus how much spare time it found. That’s a subtle but useful rhythm.

TeamVsPersonalUse

Both platforms want to be team tools — but only one *feels* like it. Motion lets you invite teammates and assign tasks, but that’s it. There’s no shared view, no transparency into each other’s workload. It’s not a true collaboration calendar as much as a fancier to-do list with scheduling. When I tried to show a teammate what my Monday looked like, they couldn’t see any of the Motion-scheduled blocks. So I had to export a PDF 😐.

Reclaim is much more “team safe.” You can see what your coworkers are *scheduled* to do without seeing the task names (unless they share them). It uses Free/Busy status smartly — so if I block out “Focus: Internal doc writing,” someone else will just see “Busy,” and won’t double-book me. You can also share habits (like your lunch or daily walk), which signals to others not to touch that time.

Reclaim’s team tools got much more natural when we added the whole content team. Suddenly, overlapping meetings were easier to spot, and I wasn’t getting random 1:1s in the middle of writing sprints.

TaskHandlingAndPriorities

Motion is insanely committed to smart scheduling, and its task panel is clean. You can add durations, categories (like Personal, Work, etc.), and even define whether a task can be split or not. Entering a five-hour task? It may chop it into three sessions unless you flag it “fixed block.” Honestly, that felt cool the *first time*. But when I wanted to block out three focused hours to record a screencast, and it kept breaking it into two sessions split by meetings, I nearly screamed.

Also: Editing a task doesn’t always trigger a reschedule. I added an hour to a task and hit save, but nothing changed. Turns out you need to toggle the “Reschedule existing” option. I didn’t even know that toggle existed until I hovered over a tiny gear icon 😑.

Reclaim has simpler task handling — and for me, that gave it some sanity. You can designate a “priority level,” then it just finds a time. You don’t need to tell it every little parameter. If you want a task to “definitely happen today,” you can toggle a “Must Do” button. That’s it. It also shows a clear burn-down of how many things did/didn’t get done on any given day.

But the biggest gap: Reclaim has no native mobile app yet. You can access it in-browser on mobile, but Motion has a slick iOS app that lets you shift your tasks around with drag-and-drop. That’s a big win if you do a lot of rescheduling while commuting or eating waffles.

FinalFeelingInRealUse

Here’s the ironic thing: both Motion and Reclaim gave me calendar anxiety in opposite ways. Motion is like a drill sergeant — it’ll pack your day with blocks, reshuffle aggressively, and expect you to keep up. Reclaim is the zen monk — courteous, gentle, but sometimes too quiet when something actually breaks. There were days I forgot to check Reclaim and missed a rescheduled focus block just because it never shouted about changes.

What tipped me toward Reclaim was seeing the *actual calendar history*. Every change it makes is trackable. I once made three changes to a research task’s due date, and it *noted all of them*, including who did it (me), and when. That felt safe. Motion just silently updates everything in the background. If you forget what used to be there — too bad.

But then again — Motion shipped me the email summary at 6am sharp with my new sprint layout, and it felt like having an assistant.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯