How to Migrate from Motion to Aftertone (2026)

If you've decided to leave Motion, you're not starting from scratch. Your calendar data lives in Google Calendar. Your tasks are in Motion's export. The muscle memory of having a structured daily schedule is already built. What you're replacing is the mechanism — from AI-managed auto-scheduling to an intentional system you control, with AI that advises rather than decides.

This guide covers exactly what to move, how to move it, and how to set up Aftertone so the first week doesn't feel like a step backward.

Why people migrate from Motion to Aftertone

The Motion cancellations that lead to Aftertone tend to follow a consistent pattern. The auto-scheduling was impressive initially — watching the AI rebuild your day in real time is genuinely novel. But over time, a specific frustration emerged: the schedule never felt like yours. Tasks landed in slots the AI chose. When a meeting appeared, everything reshuffled without asking. The calendar was optimised, in a technical sense, but the optimisation was for deadline adherence rather than for how you actually work best.

The second frustration is structural: Motion has no feedback mechanism. After months of AI-managed days, you know what was scheduled. You don't know which week configurations produced your best thinking, whether your deep work time has been quietly declining, or whether the schedule the AI is building bears any relationship to the conditions under which you've historically done your best work. The AI makes the schedule efficiently. It doesn't ask whether the schedule is well-designed.

Aftertone sits at the opposite end of that spectrum. You plan the schedule. The AI observes what happens across the week and surfaces patterns in your productivity data — which time slots produce real output, how meeting fragmentation is trending, whether this week's structure resembles your historically productive periods. The Focus Screen handles execution. The intelligence is in the analysis, not the automation.

What Aftertone does differently

Before you cancel Motion: export your data

Motion's export options are limited, but you can recover what matters most before your account closes.

Export your tasks:

1. In Motion, go to Settings → Export

2. Select Export Tasks — this produces a CSV file with task names, projects, due dates, and status

3. Download and save the file before cancelling

Your calendar events: Motion writes scheduled events back to Google Calendar. This means your existing time-blocked events are already in your Google Calendar account — you don't need to export them. When you connect Aftertone to Google Calendar, those events will appear automatically.

Your projects: Motion doesn't export projects separately from tasks. Your project structure will need to be rebuilt in Aftertone. Keep your exported CSV open during setup to reference the project names that matter.

Cancel your Motion subscription: Go to Settings → Billing → Cancel subscription. Your account stays active until the end of the billing period. Use that time to complete your migration.

Step 1 — Install Aftertone and connect Google Calendar

1. Download Aftertone from aftertone.io and install it on your Mac

2. Open Aftertone and go through the onboarding

3. When prompted, connect your Google Calendar account — the same one Motion was using

4. Aftertone will pull in your existing events. Anything Motion wrote to Google Calendar (meetings, focus blocks that became calendar events) will appear immediately

One thing to expect: Motion creates a lot of calendar events for tasks it scheduled. You'll likely see a cluttered calendar view on day one, with Motion-generated task events appearing alongside your real meetings. This is normal. The next step addresses it.

Step 2 — Clean up Motion's calendar footprint

Motion writes task blocks directly to your Google Calendar. When you stop using Motion, those auto-generated task events remain. They're not real commitments — they were Motion's scheduling output — and leaving them in place will make your Aftertone view noisy.

To clean up:

1. Open Google Calendar in your browser

2. Look for events created by Motion — these typically have the task name as the event title and appear in a distinct colour or calendar layer Motion created

3. Delete the Motion calendar layer entirely if one exists: Settings → My Calendars → [Motion calendar name] → Delete. This removes all Motion-generated events at once

4. If Motion added events to your primary calendar rather than a separate layer, you'll need to delete them individually or in bulk using Google Calendar's search function

After this, your Google Calendar — and therefore your Aftertone view — should show only real meetings and commitments. That's the clean slate you'll build on.

Step 3 — Rebuild your project structure

Open your exported Motion CSV and note the project names that contain active tasks. In Aftertone:

1. Go to the Projects section

2. Create a project for each active area from your Motion export

3. Keep naming consistent with what you had in Motion — this makes the CSV easier to work from when adding tasks

Don't recreate everything from your Motion history. Focus only on projects with tasks that are still active or upcoming. Completed work doesn't need to migrate.

Step 4 — Add your active tasks

With your projects set up, work through your Motion CSV and add active tasks to Aftertone. The fastest way to do this:

1. Use Aftertone's global keyboard shortcut (set during onboarding — usually ⌥ Space) to capture a task from anywhere on your Mac without switching windows

2. Type the task name, assign it to the relevant project, and add a due date if one existed in Motion

3. Repeat for each active task in your CSV

Most users complete this in under 30 minutes. Smart Capture converts pasted text or a screenshot into structured tasks instantly. Auto-Extend keeps the session running when you finish a task early. Pause holds your place. Smart Zoning moves tasks directly onto the calendar with keyboard shortcuts. You don't need to schedule the tasks yet — that comes in step 6. Right now you're just building the task inventory.

Step 5 — Understand the planning shift

This is the most important step in the migration, and the one most people skip in a rush to get set up.

Motion planned your day for you. Aftertone doesn't. The AI in Aftertone is an observer and advisor — it analyses the week you build and surfaces patterns in how it played out. Building the week is your job.

This is not a downgrade. It's a reframe. Motion's auto-scheduling removed the planning overhead at the cost of calendar predictability and personal ownership of the schedule. Aftertone returns that ownership and adds a feedback layer that Motion never had: weekly and daily reports that tell you whether the schedule you built actually worked and what your scheduling patterns reveal about how you do your best work.

The planning practice to adopt from day one:

• Sunday evening or Monday morning: Open Aftertone and drag tasks from your inbox into time blocks across the week. Give every task a slot before the week starts.

• Each morning: Review the day's blocks, adjust for anything that's moved, and confirm the order of your top three tasks.

• Friday: Read your AI weekly report. Note which days matched intention, which didn't, and use that to inform next week's planning.

Peter Gollwitzer's three decades of implementation intention research consistently show that specifying when and where you'll do something — rather than just intending to do it — dramatically increases follow-through. Time blocking is the practical application of this research. Motion automated that specificity away. Aftertone makes it the core practice, with AI feedback on how it's going.

Step 6 — Schedule your first week

1. Open Aftertone's week view — you'll see your existing Google Calendar meetings already in place

2. Identify your protected deep work windows — the slots where meetings are unlikely to land and your energy is typically high. For most people this is before 11am

3. Drag tasks from your task inbox into those windows. Be specific: not "work on proposal" as a 3-hour block, but "write executive summary section" as a 90-minute block

4. Fill the rest of the available slots with remaining tasks, matching task type to energy level where you can — cognitively demanding work in the morning, administrative work in the afternoon

5. Leave buffer. Motion often overfills the day. Leave 20% of slots empty to absorb the things that always appear

Step 7 — Use the Focus Screen during execution

When it's time to start a block, activate Aftertone's Focus Screen. The view narrows to your current task — nothing else visible. If you finish early, the Focus Screen presents your next tasks as numbered options; pick one and your calendar updates automatically.

This is the execution layer Motion never had. Motion placed tasks in slots; it had no mechanism for what happened inside those slots. The Focus Screen is designed around Roy Baumeister's research on decision fatigue: at the moment of starting work, visible unchosen alternatives measurably reduce both the quality of the work you start and your persistence through it. Removing that surface area at task-start is the evidence-based design choice behind the Focus Screen.

Step 8 — Read your first weekly report

After your first full week in Aftertone, your AI weekly report will be available. It's worth taking 10 minutes to read it properly rather than scanning it.

The report surfaces: which days and time slots produced your most completed work, where planned blocks were executed versus skipped, how your meeting load compared to your available focus time, and specific suggestions for the following week based on what the patterns show.

This is the intelligence Motion never provided. You had a schedule. You had no data on whether that schedule was producing what you wanted. The weekly report closes that loop — and over time, as the AI accumulates more data about your patterns, the suggestions become more precise.

Common questions from Motion migrants

I relied on Motion to prioritise my tasks for me. How do I do that myself?

Start with a simple three-tier system each morning: one task that must happen today regardless of what else occurs, two tasks that should happen if possible, and everything else in the backlog. This gives you the deadline-aware prioritisation Motion provided, without delegating the decision to an algorithm. Aftertone's task view lets you filter and sort by project and due date, which gives you the same input data Motion used to make those decisions.

Motion rescheduled around my meetings automatically. Do I have to do that manually now?

Yes — when a meeting lands, you adjust your blocks around it. This takes under two minutes for a typical day and has a benefit Motion's automation didn't: you make a conscious choice about what gets deprioritised rather than having the AI decide. Over time, users consistently report that this conscious rescheduling decision makes them more protective of their blocked time — they become more likely to decline or shorten meetings when they can see directly what the trade-off is.

Will Aftertone work with my Outlook calendar?

Aftertone currently syncs with Google Calendar only. If your meetings are in Outlook, you'll need to connect Outlook to Google Calendar via Google's Outlook sync, or continue viewing Outlook events through a separate app alongside Aftertone.

What happens to my Motion data after I cancel?

Motion retains your data for 30 days after cancellation. After that, it's deleted. Make sure you've exported your task CSV and noted your project structure before cancelling, and before that 30-day window closes.

I had Motion's team features for my small team. Does Aftertone replace that?

Aftertone is an individual productivity tool — there are no team features, shared calendars within the app, or team scheduling capabilities. If your team was using Motion's meeting scheduling and shared task boards, you'll need a separate tool for those functions. Aftertone addresses the individual productivity layer only.

The migration in a day

Most Aftertone users coming from Motion are fully set up within a single working day. Export your Motion tasks in the morning, install Aftertone and connect Google Calendar, clean up Motion's calendar footprint, rebuild your project structure, add your active tasks, and schedule the week. By the end of the day you'll have a cleaner, more intentional schedule than Motion's algorithm ever produced — and by Friday, the weekly report will give you the first feedback you've had on how your schedule is actually working.