Habits are a way to make time on your calendar for routines and other things you want to get done on a regular basis.

Set up time for exercise every day between 9am and 5pm, or make sure you write your status report every Friday between 3pm and 5pm. Whatever the ritual, Habits make it easy to create rules that your calendar can follow and adapt to as your schedule changes.

You can create a Habit from the Habits page by clicking + New Habit, or by selecting one of the 100+ pre-made templates under the templates tab. Reclaim only needs a few rules to start scheduling time for your routine:

The name of the Habit event that will display on your calendar.

This tells Reclaim what color to categorize the event as, and what kind of event the Habit is (Solo Work or Personal) which has an impact on your calendar analytics.

The minimum and maximum amount of time you want to spend on the Habit at a time.

Your preferred days and hours that you want to complete your Habit.

You can choose from use your Working, Meeting, or Personal hours (learn more about scheduling hours here), or set custom scheduling hours for even more granular control around when your Habit schedules.

How often you'd like the Habit to schedule — daily, weekly, every other week, monthly, or quarterly.

The ideal time you would like to schedule the Habit. Note that your ideal time must overlap with the scheduling hours you have selected.

When you want the first instance of the Habit to be scheduled. By default Habits begin scheduling as soon as possible.

You can choose to add a description to your Habits for quick access to links or notes you need for that routine. This description will be added to each scheduled event for that Habit on your calendar.

You can use markdown to further customize your Habit description (more on markdown formatting here).

You can opt to hide details of your Habit from others so the event just appears as "Busy" on your calendar, or include the title and description for more context. Reclaim will pre-populate a default description, or you can add your own.

Reclaim initially schedules Habits as "Free" time to keep you flexible to changes. As your day books up or you get closer to the event's start time, Reclaim automatically flips the event to "Busy" to defend the Habit on your calendar. Time Defense settings let you control how aggressively you want Reclaim to defend a Habit on your calendar by marking them as "Busy" sooner. Learn more about how Time defense settings work here.

Reclaim will use your default Google Calendar notification preferences to send you a notification before the event begins. Learn more about how to manage event notifications here.

Advanced options are not required to create a Habit, but it's a great way to get even more control over your calendar. Click Advanced options on the Habit's edit screen to view these additional options.

You can invite other people to your event. Reclaim will not check availability for any invitees, and also will not send them any notifications.

Add words or phrases Reclaim should look for on your calendar so you don't schedule time for a Habit if you're already getting time for that routine.

For example, if you have a Habit for Lunch, you might add words like lunch or restaurant, so that Reclaim doesn't book the Habit when you have other 'lunch' events on that day.

Just like an Out-of-Office event in Google Calendar, you can opt to decline invites automatically if they interrupt your Habit. You can set the default message to send to others when an interruption is declined, or customize a message.