Habits are a way to make time on your calendar for routines and other things you want to get done on a regular basis. For example, 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.
Basic settings
Reclaim only needs a few things to create a Habit for you:
Title
The name of the Habit that will display on your calendar.
Category
This tells Reclaim what kind of event the Habit is—Solo Work or Personal—which has an impact on your calendar analytics.
Time Window
The window of time where you want the Habit to be scheduled you can use your working, meeting, or personal hours. Additionally, you can set custom hours for the habit as well.
Duration
The minimum and maximum amount of time you want to spend on the Habit.
Days of Week
Which days of the week are eligible to schedule the Habit
Frequency
How often you'd like to do the Habit—daily, weekly, every other week, monthly, or quarterly.
Times per week
If you select a weekly frequency for your Habit, you can tell Reclaim how many times per week you want the Habit to be scheduled.
Ideal Day
If you select Every other day, Monthly, or Quarterly frequency, you can tell Reclaim which day of the week you ideally like your Habit to be scheduled.
Starting
When you want the first instance of the Habit to be scheduled.
Habit description
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.
Visibility
You can opt to hide the title and description of the event from others on your calendar, or include a title and description. Reclaim will pre-populate a default description, or you can add your own.
Advanced options
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.
Time Defense
Reclaim initially adds Habits to your calendar ahead of time and marks them as Free time, and then flips them to Busy as your day fills up or as you get closer to the event's start time. This setting let you control how aggressively you want Reclaim to defend your time by flipping Habits to Busy earlier. Read more in depth on how Time Defense settings work.
Notifications
Reclaim will use your default Google Calendar notification preferences to send you a notification before the event begins. Refer to Manage event notifications.
CC Others
You can invite other people to your event. Reclaim will not check availability for any invitees, and also will not send them any notifications.
Avoid Duplicate Events
Give Reclaim a list of words to look for on your calendar so that Reclaim won't schedule a Habit if it thinks you're already getting time for that activity. For example, if you have a Habit called Lunch, you might add words like lunch
or eat food
so that Reclaim doesn't book a Habit over other lunch-like events.
Auto-Decline Interruptions
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.