Trevor AI is a really interesting tool in the productivity space. It was created with the goal of combining the calendar and the to-do list, which makes perfect sense! Calendars and to-do lists are both indispensable in any worker’s life - and combining them is especially useful for those who manage teams or juggle many deadlines.
What I find unique about Trevor AI is that it is very thoughtfully designed to keep the user in control. It has features for manually planning your day and week, but it also has “AI suggestions” which can auto-plan your week based on your task deadlines. You can override these suggestions and even tweak individual tasks in your calendar with several options including “reschedule” (manual) and “quick reschedule” (AI).
Like most Dreamtask competitors, the features of Trevor AI are numerous - they certainly outnumber those of Dreamtask. While this is partially due to the fact that Dreamtask is still very new, there’s another reason for this.
Dreamtask is focused on what matters.
Since Dreamtask is designed to work within Notion, and not as a standalone system, the bells and whistles of other productivity apps are not needed. That’s the beauty of having a tool that treats Notion as a first class integration partner. Meanwhile, Trevor AI does not currently integrate with Notion.
For the rest of this article, I’m going to focus on a critical difference between Dreamtask and Trevor AI - deadlines.
Trevor AI gives the user the ability to set deadlines for tasks, and those deadlines get used by the AI to schedule the tasks. However, there’s no option to differentiate between soft and hard deadlines.
In my experience as a knowledge worker for almost 10 years, the reality is that some deadlines matter more than others. Some deadlines are artificial - merely there to assign a priority to a task. Other deadlines are more “real” - they signal that someone (other than you) will be upset if the task isn’t done by the expected time.
Naturally, soft and hard deadlines need to be treated differently in any serious productivity system.
If you reach the end of the day and you have two tasks unfinished - one with a soft deadline and one with a hard deadline - your AI scheduler needs to be able to push one later in the week and keep the other on the top of your schedule. It is quite simple, really. But Trevor AI can’t handle that on its own.
However, my frustration with Trevor AI and other tools like it is that they’re so focused on being different (AI, slick user interface) that they miss low hanging fruit that turn out to be quite critical (#criticalfruit - make it happen)! This is the kind of stuff that makes productivity tools actually useful to real people with real world problems.
For that reason, and because of the lack of Notion integration, I’d still choose Dreamtask over Trevor AI. Obviously, I am biased because I created Dreamtask - but I created it because I saw this glaring hole in the market. A market saturated with shiny, beautiful tools that look impressive but aren’t actually all that useful for real people who are trying to get sh*t done.