This article applies to both legacy Reclaim 1.0 and the latest Reclaim 2.0. You can confirm your current app version on your User Profile.
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While time blocking is a really useful way to make sure you actually get the important stuff done, it can also be tricky if you're the kind of person who has a lot of inbound meetings. If your calendar is too full and unavailable, you might find yourself spending a lot of time negotiating with your colleagues for available times.
Reclaim helps you to balance this out by leveraging a concept that most people don't use in their Google or Outlook calendars: free and busy events. Here's a short guide that walks you through what free and busy events are in the calendaring world, as well as how Reclaim uses them.
Understanding free and busy events
In Google Calendar and Outlook, events can be designated as either free or busy. By default, the vast majority of events you create (with the exception of all-day events) are created as busy by default.
Free events are shown as available times to others when they book time with you. They are visible to you when viewing your calendar, but not to others.
Busy events are shown as unavailable times to others when they book time with you. They are visible to you and to others as blocked.
Reclaim also uses visual indicators to differentiate these events: events with a dotted outline are set to 'Free,' while events with a solid outline are set to 'Busy.'
When creating an event in Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar you can see (and set) whether an event is free or busy:
How does Reclaim use free and busy events?
Reclaim uses free and busy events on the calendar in order to give you the power of time blocking while still keeping your schedule flexible and available for meetings. Every day, millions of simulations are run against your calendar to determine how much "wiggle room" Reclaim has to block time for your Habits, Tasks, and Smart Meetings.
If Reclaim sees that your schedule has some flexibility and room to get something done, it will put the time on the calendar but mark it as free time. You can clearly see which events are marked as free time from the đ emoji that is added in front of the title. This is an indicator that the event is visible to you, but shown as available to others. Additionally, events marked as free are displayed with a dotted outline in the calendar, providing another visual cue for their flexibility.
As Reclaim starts to detect that you're running out of time to get your time blocks done, it will flip the events to busy automatically and add a đĄď¸ emoji in front of the title. This indicates that the time is now shown as unavailable to others. Furthermore, events marked as busy are displayed with a solid infill in the calendar, reinforcing their status as blocked time.
The purpose of this feature is to give you the best of both worlds: you get to focus on the stuff that matters without losing control over your availability.
Examples of how Reclaim uses free and busy events
Free and busy status shows up across several Reclaim features and helps determine when time should stay flexible versus when it should be protected on your calendar.
Habits: Habit events can stay free while thereâs enough flexibility to move them elsewhere. As your calendar fills up and Reclaim has fewer options to reschedule the Habit, the event can switch to busy to better protect that time.
Smart Meetings: Smart Meetings can stay flexible while Reclaim has other workable times available. As scheduling options narrow, Reclaim can more strongly protect the meeting time based on its scheduling rules.
Calendar Sync: Synced invitations can appear as free until you respond. Once you RSVP Yes or Maybe, Reclaim can treat that time as busy.
Focus Time: Focus Time does not use free/busy status to decide when to protect time. Focus Time blocks are scheduled based on your Focus Time goals and Agent rules, and are treated as protected time once theyâre placed on your calendar.
Locked events always show as busy
Reclaim can automatically "lock" events to prevent them from moving automatically. This is helpful if you want to make your schedule more predictable, especially as the time horizon grows nearer on the calendar. You can learn more about locking here.
Locked events, in addition to no longer moving automatically, are always marked as busy time.