Use case

Use Cases: Combining Calendars

The real power of Motion’s calendar layers shows up when you combine them. Here are common ways people use Accounts, My Calendars, and Frequently Met With together:

Scenario	How to set it up	Why it works
Balancing work + personal life	Connect both accounts; set your work calendar as the main account, add your personal calendar to My Calendars.	Motion protects family or personal commitments while keeping work as the default for new events.
Team coordination	Save teammates’ calendars in Frequently Met With.	Lets you overlay their schedules to find mutual availability — without blocking your own task scheduling.
Project-specific focus	Keep only relevant calendars in My Calendars (e.g., work + client calendar, but not old side projects).	Reduces noise, so only active calendars affect availability.
Freelance / side hustle	Connect multiple accounts; mark client calendars in My Calendars while keeping personal ones as Frequently Met With.	Motion balances deadlines across gigs while still showing personal visibility when needed.

Key idea: Combining calendars helps Motion give you a schedule that reflects your real life — work, personal, and team — without creating conflicts.

Why Externally Display Your Tasks?:

• Improved Meeting Planning: When tasks show as busy, schedulers avoid interrupting essential work.

• Single Source of Truth: Maintain a unified calendar that reflects your real workload.

• Transparency and Time Management: As Motion’s AI algorithm reschedules tasks, these changes are reflected externally, ensuring ongoing coordination with teammates, colleagues, and friends.

Displaying Motion tasks on your external calendar both harnesses the power of Motion’s AI-driven task management and improves scheduling coordination and team collaboration.

It ensures that your availability reflects not just your meetings, but also critical work blocks formed from busy tasks; preventing conflicts and enhancing productivity.

Motion App- Busy Task Display

Busy Task Display on an External Main Calendar

Motion’s external task display operates via a uni-directional sync, meaning only tasks created in Motion will show externally. Inversely, tasks created in your external main calendar won't display in Motion. For more information about uni-directional task syncing click [here]

Showing All Tasks as Free:

• Tasks from Motion sync to your external main calendar but are marked as free, meaning others can see your displayed tasks, but will still have the ability to book meetings with you during those time slots.

• Expectations: Your external calendar will populate with Motion tasks, but they won’t prevent overlapping meetings. This option allows for flexibility without sacrificing visibility.

• Best for: Users who want to reflect their workload externally without blocking availability.

• Example: A part-time freelance writer may choose this option, allowing clients to see when they’re working on projects while keeping availability open for client meetings.

Showing At-Risk Tasks as Busy:

• Motion tasks that are nearing their deadlines are marked as busy and create blocked periods of time in your external calendar where the task is scheduled. This ensures your external calendar shows your busy status, and deters others from scheduling meetings during these times.

• Expectations: Your external calendar will reflect critical deadlines as busy blocks. Motion automatically transitions tasks to a ‘busy’ status as their due date approaches.

• Best for: Users managing tight project deadlines who need to preserve their focus time.

• Example: A project manager is juggling multiple assignments with rapidly approaching deadlines. As the task deadline(s) near, the project managers’ calendar begins to show their tasks as busy, signaling to others that their focus is locked in during that time and they are unavailable for meetings.