Engineering Managers need deep work as well as regular 1:1's & meetings with their teams. Reclaim manages your calendar to protect time for both as well as handling reschedules on your behalf. This is all driven through priorities & preferences defined by you.
Need | Feature | Learning Materials |
Less overhead managing recurring 1:1s and team syncs that keep getting bumped | Convert your existing recurring one-on-ones into Smart Meetings so that Reclaim can automatically resolve conflicts on your behalf. Instead of you doing it manually. This works best for internal meetings that you own with up to 3 or 4 co-workers
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Prep time before important meetings | Meeting Prep & Decompress Buffers enable you to create a block of time before or after specific events so that you have time to prepare or take a break. Using the event matcher - you create filters based on an infinite number of criteria. Example: 5 min before 1:1 meetings, or 15 min after a Sprint Retro. | |
Flexible defended time for deep work | Focus agents - 2 kinds
Focus Time proactively holds time so you can hold time for deep work before you're totally booked up with meetings.
Defend Meeting Overload caps meeting load by blocking your calendar with busy blocks AFTER you've crossed your defined limit of meetings. You can still accept invitations on top of these blocks.
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Routines to protect work time | Habits help flexibly hold time for recurring work routines like coding blocks, ticket review, and code review. These habits are protected and scheduled based on your priorities. | |
Knowing what to work on when a Focus block or Habit starts | Tasks can be created natively in Reclaim or be pulled from supported integrations (Asana, Jira, etc.) into Reclaim, and you can assign a filtered set of it to a Focus Time block or to a Habit. The block opens with the right Task queue already in front of you instead of a blank hour. |
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Minimizing Slack interruptions & fragmenting your attention or heads down time | Reclaim's Slack status sync enables you to set custom Slack statuses as well as turn on Do Not Disturb depending on the category of meeting. Example: DND automatically during Focus Time so a heads down block stays heads down. | |
Managing your calendar from the tools you already work in | Reclaim Chat and the MCP connectors let you manage your calendar in plain language from Claude or ChatGPT. Preview Mode stages every change for you to review first, so nothing lands on your calendar until you say so. | |
Keeping personal commitments from getting double booked | Calendar Sync copies events from another calendar onto your work calendar as busy blocks, so that Reclaim and your co-workers see you as busy and schedule around them. After creating the Sync, set the 'visibility' to 'Busy for all' and the details of the events are not copied - just a busy block. This is different from a Connected Calendar, which only tells Reclaim about your availability without placing anything on your work calendar. | |
Sync your team's Out-of-Office Calendars to intelligently plan around PTO.Team | Team Out-of-Office Calendars give your team a shared, automatic view of who’s unavailable, so you can plan work and schedules without surprises |
Week one setup
Set Meeting Hours and Working Hours under settings. This tells Reclaim where to schedule Focus, Habits, and your meetings
Add Defend Meeting Overload, or Focus Time to protect some time from meetings
Set the "Minimum Event duration" to 1 hour, or longer.
Convert 1 or 2 recurring 1:1's that you own into a Smart Meeting
Add two Habits
Lunch, a personal habit. Set as Medium Priority & 'Remove from schedule' if there's no time available
An engineering Habit Agent of your choice. You can either choose one from the template library and customize it, or start a new one with a Custom Habit. If you already have recurring manual blocks on your calendar you can also convert those into flexible Reclaim managed Habit Agents by clicking on the event in your Planner. You'll see "Make a Habit" in the event.
Add a Buffers Agent for Team syncs or your 1:1, give yourself 5 min to prep before these meetings. Set to High Priority.
Review your Agent list & stack rank them in the order you prioritize them. Agents of the same Priority level will be deployed in the order on the list. Focus is pinned to low so as to not block your calendar from other Habits and important Meetings.
Tips
Priority drives how Reclaim places events on your calendar — link priority vs. agent priority creates the extra bookable availability.
Reclaim sees events without an RSVP as free - so if there is no RSVP, Reclaim may book over the event, and it will look like an overlap until there is an RSVP.
Reschedule Habits or Focus Time - You can drag and drop Habits or Focus blocks to a different time (either on the Planner or on your Calendar) & they will 'Lock' in at that time telling Reclaim not to move them again. You can 'unlock' by right clicking in the event in the Planner.