Focus Time is the easiest way to carve out more productive hours in your week for heads-down work. You set a weekly Focus Time goal, and Reclaim proactively finds and defends those hours around your meetings, Habits, and other priorities.

The best part is that you don’t have to decide exactly when every Focus block should happen in advance. You can leave Focus Time as flexible blocks that move as your schedule changes, while Reclaim keeps working toward your weekly goal.

Focus Time has a companion Agent, Defend Meeting Overload, which tackles the same problem from the opposite direction by capping how much time goes to meetings. The two Agents create the same kind of protected time block and work well together.

You can create a Focus Time Agent in a few ways:

When you create or edit a Focus Time Agent, Reclaim will show the proposed calendar impact in Preview Mode first so you can review where the blocks will land before applying any changes.

Your Focus Time rules tell Reclaim how much time you want protected and how it should fit into your week.

You can configure:

Like other Reclaim smart events, Focus Time helps defend the time you need while keeping you flexible as the week shifts.

Focus Time blocks can automatically move to another available slot when higher-priority events need the time.

A few things to know:

This lets Reclaim keep working toward your overall Focus Time goal without forcing every block to stay in one fixed place.

Focus Time is prioritized a little differently than your other Reclaim Agents.

The Focus Time Agent itself is pinned to Low priority, which gives other Agents like Habits and Smart Meetings room to schedule first.

But once Focus Time is placed on your calendar, the Focus Time events are treated as High priority. That means only a Critical Scheduling Link can offer those time slots as available for booking.

This setup lets you build a more concrete plan with other smart events while still protecting open time for heads-down work.

Both features help protect productive time, but they’re designed for different needs.

So if you want to protect more productive time overall, use Focus Time. If you can name the specific recurring activity you want to find time for, use a Habit.

You can also use both together. For example, you might use Focus Time to protect several hours of flexible deep work each week, while using Habits for specific routines like weekly planning or email catch-up.

If you assign tasks to Focus Time, the same task list can appear across your Focus Time blocks throughout the week. Habits can each use their own task filters, making them better for specific recurring workflows.

Another event may have needed the time, or a higher-priority Habit or Smart Meeting may have taken precedence.

Reclaim will try to move Focus Time elsewhere while continuing to work toward your weekly goal.

Raise your Minimum event duration.

A longer minimum will give you fewer, longer Focus blocks instead of several shorter ones.

Check your minimum event duration and scheduling hours.

If your minimum block is long and your calendar is fragmented with meetings, Reclaim may have fewer places where Focus Time can fit. Widening your available hours or allowing shorter blocks gives Reclaim more options.

Check how the events on your calendar are categorized.

A recurring event assigned to the wrong category can either inflate your Focus Time total or prevent time from being counted correctly.

If you have questions or run into issues, reach out to the Reclaim support team at [email protected] or use the in-app chat to get help.