From Tasks to Time Block: An Interview with David Tedaldi, CEO of Morgen

In a calendar market often split between simple, elegant schedulers and complex task managers, Morgen has successfully bridged the gap. In this exclusive interview, David Tedaldi, CEO of Morgen, shares Morgen’s mission to help people “spend time on what matters most to them.”

He provides deep insights into the platform’s core differentiator: a human-in-the-loop AI Planner that unifies all your events and external tasks into one visually intuitive schedule, ensuring Mac power users can stop managing inputs and start managing time. 

Interview with David Tedaldi

TheSweetBits: First of all, can you tell us about the story of Morgen, what kind of need or dream did Morgen start with?

David: “We help people spend time on what matters most to them. We started by helping people bring all the data that makes up their time into one place, meaning consolidating tasks, projects, events, and calendars all in one place.

Then we engineered the most intuitive way to defend time for work that matters around meetings, building a great planner experience. And then we made it smart, building in an AI assistant that recommends the best possible plan based on your preferences, energy levels, and what you like to work on when, so you never miss a deadline.

What makes our AI assistant unique is that you are always in control — the AI crunches the complex data and figures out the best possible plan, but before making any change it checks in with you, showing you a preview you can accept or adjust before confirming, so you always know what changed and why!”

Morgen unifies tasks and calendars. What is the single “game changer” feature users praise most for personal time management?

“I think the one thing people consistently praise is how easy it is to plan visually using Morgen. Whether you want to try out time-blocking your ClickUp tasks on your iCloud calendar, or you let AI crunch your tasks across three other task management tools, what you get in the end is one simple and visually pleasing plan, in a format that feels natural to digest, right in your calendar.”

Your AI Planner uses “Frames” but is “human-in-the-loop.” What’s the philosophy behind this design, and why must the user always remain in control?

“If you take a first-principle approach, you realize there’s no choice to be made here: leaving the user, the owner of their time, in the loop is the only way to build this.

As an example, trained executive assistants who have worked with their boss for years still check in with them before changing their plans. How would any AI be better than a human who has known you for 20 years? So we built it differently from how anyone else did, and here’s how this works.

First, we wanted to gather a profound understanding of how you prefer to work. This is what you do when setting up your Frames. With Frames, you can design your ideally ordinary week, how you’d like to spend time in the ideal case.

For example, in the mornings Monday to Thursday, I want to do focused development work; on Friday morning, I’d like to address tedious admin tasks; and all afternoons I’ll do customer and investor relations work. Once you specify that with Frames, the AI can build the optimal plan based on your actual availability, your preferences, and your priorities and deadlines.

We then show you this suggestion in the form of a preview which you can review and accept or adapt before confirming. That’s how we build the best and most personalized plans in the industry while keeping you in total control.”

You’ve also introduced the new Morgen Web. Can you share more about that?

“At the beginning, we really focused on building a fantastic and reliable product. We started with an installable desktop app because that aligned well with our first users.

But now that we’ve drastically expanded the work stacks we can support, we realized we had to move to the web to satisfy the needs of all these new users we were onboarding.

This allowed us to address a lot of changes we’d wanted to make for a long time — syncing is now even faster and more reliable, and the app’s responsiveness has improved drastically.”

For dedicated Mac users, what specific native macOS features did you prioritize for an integrated desktop workflow?

 “We’ve built a global command bar to allow easy creation of a task or event from anywhere on your Mac. You can make Morgen appear as a sidebar overlay from anywhere with another shortcut, and finally, you can have an always-on tray menu in the top menu bar showing what’s up next in your day.”

Morgen requires a paid subscription. How do you articulate the value of this investment compared to free calendar solutions?

“If you want to time-block with simple events, you can and should use Google Calendar or some other free option. However, if you want to transform those vague intentions into a detailed plan thanks to AI — with suggestions that take into consideration all your priorities and deadlines, with full context from your tasks and project management tools — then you might prefer to use Morgen.”

Finally, if a new user only had five minutes to set up Morgen, what are the two or three essential steps to maximize their productivity immediately?

“I’d recommend they do 3 things:

• Connect their calendar and bring in tasks from wherever they have them (project and task management apps) — less than a minute.
• Visually create their “ideal ordinary week” using Frames, e.g. setting up a Frame in the morning for focused work pulling tasks from their project management tool, and one more Frame in the afternoons for admin work — about 2 to 3 minutes.
• Hit the AI Planner button to get a personalized plan ensuring all deadlines are met, respectful of their preferences, and built around any pre-existing commitments — just a matter of seconds.”

Footnotes

We extend our sincere thanks to David Tedaldi for his responses and to Jim for his support throughout the process!

David’s perspective is invaluable for understanding the evolving landscape of high-end Mac productivity apps.

Read our full Morgen review here for a deeper dive into its features. Or go to morgen.so and start your free trial.

Loved the article, share!