A Habit agent holds time for a routine you want to happen regularly — lunch, weekly planning, an end-of-day catch-up, monthly expense reports. You give Reclaim a window and a duration, and it finds the time.
What a Habit does
A Habit isn't a fixed recurring event. Rather than booking one time and holding it, Reclaim places the Habit inside a window you set — and if a meeting is booked over it, Reclaim moves it to the next best time in that window instead of leaving you to move it by hand. You control how much it's allowed to flex through the agent's rules.
How to create a Habit Agent
Click Add at the top of your Agents list, or Create in the top navigation, to open the
Agent library, then choose a template under Habits. The library includes routines like lunch and an end-of-day catch-up, along with many more.
Alternatively, ask the chat assistant — for example, "Create a daily routine for 30 minutes around noon called Lunch."
Creating a Habit puts you into Preview Mode first, so you can see where it lands on your calendar before anything is applied.
Habit agent rules
The agent rules are how you tell Reclaim where you're willing to let this event flex:
Can shorten to — whether Reclaim can make the event shorter to fit it into a full week
Can move within — whether Reclaim can reschedule to any Working Hour, or to One-off hours you narrow to specific days and times
Reclaim Smart Time Defense — how aggressively Reclaim defends the time, marking it free or busy depending on your availability, preferences, and priorities
Turning an existing recurring event into a Habit
If the routine is already a recurring event on your calendar, you don't need to recreate it. In the Planner, select the event and choose Make a habit at the bottom of the event card.
This works for solo recurring events — the ones with just you on them. A recurring event with other internal attendees is a Smart Meeting rather than a Habit, since Reclaim has other people's availability to work around.
Give Reclaim a window, not a set time
Rather than "lunch at 12:00 for an hour," you tell Reclaim: lunch anytime between 11:30 and 2:00, ideally around 12:00, for 30 minutes to an hour. Reclaim picks the time based on the rest of your day, so if your morning runs long, lunch shifts later instead of conflicting with your 12:00. A wider window gives Reclaim more places to put it.
Duration can flex too
Set what you'd like and the minimum you'd accept: an hour when there's room, 15 minutes when there isn't. That way the routine still happens on a full week, at a shorter length.
How Reclaim defends the time: Smart Time Defense
Reclaim doesn't just mark your Habit busy and leave it there. Reclaim Smart Time Defense flips the event between free and busy depending on how much room is left in your day.
While there's still plenty of space, the Habit sits on your calendar as a free event, shown with a dotted border. Colleagues can still book that time
As your day fills up and it becomes your last realistic chance to get the time, Reclaim flips it to busy and defends it
So your lunch stays bookable while there's another option, and becomes protected once there isn't. That's what lets a Habit hold time without making you look unavailable all week.
What happens when your week gets busy
Priority decides when a Habit gets scheduled and how hard Reclaim defends it. When it can't place one as intended, Reclaim will:
Move it to another slot in your window
Shorten it to your minimum duration
Take it off your calendar, or leave it on as a conflicting event so you have a visual cue that the day was too full. You choose which, per Habit
Learn more: How Reclaim uses Priorities to plan your workweek
How to assign tasks to a Habit
A Habit can pull in a filtered list of your tasks, which you'll see in the Tasks Tab when the block starts. Each Habit keeps its own separate search, so a Habit for reporting can pull only reporting tasks while another Habit pulls something else entirely.
You can assign tasks either through the agent directly, or by clicking the Habit event in the Planner.
Learn more: How to assign tasks to your Focus Time and Habit agents
Deciding who sees it
Busy or free — the starting point Smart Time Defense works from
Visibility — whether colleagues see Event details or just Busy
Keeping a routine free and visible tells your team what you're doing while still letting them book the time if they need it.
Troubleshooting
Why did Reclaim move my Habit?
Something higher priority needed the time, so Reclaim found the next best slot. Raise the Habit's priority or narrow its rescheduling window.
I deleted the event from my calendar and it came back.
Deleting one occurrence tells Reclaim to find a new time. Use Skip to cancel a single occurrence instead.
My Habit stopped moving after I dragged it.
If you manually move a Habit in your Planner or in Google Calendar, Reclaim locks it and stops auto-rescheduling. Unlock it by right-clicking the event in the Planner.
Reclaim stopped scheduling my Habit.
Widen the window or lower the minimum duration. If the window is narrow and your calendar is full, there may be nowhere it fits.