Getting started with Reclaim

What is Reclaim? Who is it for? And how do you get started with it? Read on to find out more...

Updated over a week ago

Welcome to Reclaim! If you're just getting set up, you're in the right place. In this doc we'll cover a few important topics to help get you started and on your way:

  • What is Reclaim, and how is it different?

  • Who is Reclaim for?

  • How do I get started with Reclaim?

  • How do I convince my team to use it?

If you've got any questions at any point, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected], or just click the chat bubble to talk with us.

What is Reclaim?

Reclaim is an intelligent calendar assistant that works with your existing calendars to help you, your teams, and your company to optimize your schedule for work and life around your preferences and priorities.

Calendars are incredibly important in determining what we focus on, but all too often they end up leading us astray. It's not because we're bad at knowing what's important -- it's that our calendars don't know what matters to us, so they can't make smart decisions about where we spend our time. Moreover, the amount of effort and toil that goes into managing a busy calendar (especially in a company or team where things are changing all the time) is just too much for one human to handle.

Think of Reclaim as the brain that translates your needs and priorities to the reality of your calendar, and that has your back as your schedule changes and new stuff comes in. It's meant to make you more flexible, adaptive, and productive in how you spend your days.

What makes Reclaim different?

Maybe you've used other calendar apps before, or maybe you've even used apps that sound like Reclaim. Maybe you're even a little skeptical. That's ok. We get it.


We built Reclaim based on years of lived experience and practices we used (manually) to keep our calendars in check. Because of that lived experience, we built Reclaim to do a better job of dealing with the primary challenges that busy professionals experience when trying to manage their schedules. Below, we'll detail what those challenges are and how Reclaim deals with them.

Automation

It's one thing to block time out on your calendar, or to make the "perfect" schedule late on a Sunday night. But when Monday rolls around, our schedule meets reality: endless meeting invites, interruptions, and a whole bunch of unresolved scheduling conflicts. Reclaim brings smart automation into the calendar by automatically managing these inbound conflicts for you, and adjusts your calendar as things change to keep you on track while accommodating schedule shifts.

That means that your focused work, your personal stuff, your meetings -- they all get automatically managed by Reclaim according to your unique preferences and priorities. But even though Reclaim automates your schedule, you're always in the driver's seat and can make changes manually if you want to take back control.

Flexibility

Filling up your calendar with time to focus sounds good in principle, but in practice it tends to make our lives harder. Our colleagues tend to view large "I'm busy" blocks as things they can just steamroll over, and if they can't find time on your calendar, they'll ping you on email or chat to see if you're available. This adds to your toil instead of making it easier.

Reclaim uses patent-pending intelligence to automatically keep your schedule flexible. Instead of just filling up your schedule with busy blocks, it dynamically shifts your events between free and busy as your schedule fills up so that you stay available -- but not so available that you can't get time for the stuff that matters.

Prioritization

It's not enough to simply say that focus time is good and meetings are bad. Focus time can be bad if it's not focused on getting time for your priorities. Meetings can be good if they're helping your team to collaborate on getting something important done. There are weeks where we need a mixture of both, or more of one than the other.

Instead of thinking about your schedule in oversimplified terms, Reclaim uses a much smarter measure: your priorities. Priorities can be assigned to anything on your calendar in Reclaim -- meetings, focused work, personal routines, and so forth -- and can be shifted to reflect your particular needs for a given week. Priorities give you a new way to shape your workweek. Instead of your calendar being a random assortment of events, it gets to be a reflection of what matters to you.

Extensibility

Let's face it: there are too many calendar and to-do apps out there. Your company probably has at least a half-dozen. You might even have a few you like. We want you to be able to use any of them with Reclaim.

Reclaim integrates with the task and project management platforms you already use and extends to the places where you already do your work so that you don't have to adopt a whole-new calendar UI, and so that you can leverage the work you've already captured in other places to schedule it on your calendar using Reclaim.

Who is Reclaim for?

Reclaim is used by hundreds of thousands of busy professionals across over 35,000 companies. Engineering teams, sales teams, marketing teams, and more all use Reclaim to manage their schedules. But regardless of their role, we tend to think of our users as divided into two primary personas: Mitch Meetings and Frankie Focus.

Frankie Focus

Frankie Focus tends to not have many meetings on their calendar. They don't spend a ton of time fighting with their schedule on a day-to-day basis -- but they definitely encounter the issue of being pulled into meetings by others and getting little time to focus on their work. They also feel the effects of the calendar degrading their work-life balance.

Reclaim helps Frankie:

  • Get more time for focused work

  • Communicate their availability without interrupting their work

  • Retain a healthy work-life balance

  • Schedule their less-frequent meetings, like 1:1s or candidate interviews

  • Get space between back-to-back meetings

Mitch Meetings

Mitch Meetings tends to have lots of meetings on their calendar, and feels the pain of having to manage their calendar on a day-to-day basis. They are looking to just carve out some time in between meetings to get focused work done, but they're also looking to have their meetings get managed more effectively, get space between meetings, and give themselves a healthier work-life balance.

Reclaim helps Mitch:

  • Defend more limited time for focused work on key priorities

  • Communicate availability without interrupting their work

  • Retain a healthy work-life balance

  • Schedule many 1:1s and coordinate external meetings

  • Get space between back-to-back meetings

In addition to Reclaim being used by folks like Mitch and Frankie, we also see Reclaim being used by individuals, teams, and companies. Reclaim provides value for each of these groups at different stages, but Reclaim is most valuable when it's used across teams.

Reclaim for individuals

Reclaim helps you as an individual to make time for your most important priorities across work and life. It gives you a full-time assistant to manage your calendar without you having to constantly tinker with it to make it do what you want. It also makes sure that you're flexible enough to meet with important internal and external audiences without losing out on your focused work.

Reclaim for teams

When used in a team, Reclaim is a powerful way to make sure everyone's schedule is optimized across timezones, availability, and preferences. It can manage your team's 1:1s, gives everyone context about what folks are working on (without having to ask), and automatically resolves meeting conflicts when stuff changes. It makes the whole team more agile and adaptive in how they spend their time.

Reclaim for companies

When used across the whole company, Reclaim gets everyone back time in their workweeks. By creating schedules that are both automated and flexible, the entire company spends less time managing their calendars and more time focused on their priorities. It ensures that schedules are being spent on priorities, not on random events.

How do I get started with Reclaim?

Reclaim has a lot of powerful capabilities to help you manage your schedule. Rather than give you a list of features, we'll talk through the different kinds of use cases and goals that you can leverage Reclaim for, and where you should start if you're interested in one or the other.

We also offer a great Setup Guide in the product if you want to explore Reclaim that way.

Work-life balance

Looking to make your work-life balance better and reduce late night and weekend work? Check out these features and capabilities to help you out:

Habits

Habits help you to make time for your personal routines in a smarter, more adaptive and flexible way. Perhaps the most common example is making time to eat some lunch on a regular basis (we recommend starting there) but there are dozens of other pre-built Reclaim templates if you need inspiration.

Helpful guides

Calendar Sync

Calendar Sync automatically keeps events in sync from your personal calendar to your work calendar, without sacrificing your privacy or showing sensitive details to your colleagues. It's a simple feature, but it's incredibly powerful in terms of maintaining a healthy separation between work and life.

Helpful guides

Slack Status Sync

Your calendar isn't the only place where you get interrupted. Reclaim can automatically sync your Slack status with your calendar -- and show custom messages and statuses for different kinds of events -- as well as automatically set your status and Do Not Disturb when you're outside working hours.

Helpful guides

Buffer Time

Getting breaks between meetings is a critical part of reducing fatigue throughout the workday, as is making sure you have time to travel between important personal events. Reclaim can automatically add time between events to ensure you always have the time you need to travel or take breaks.

Helpful guides

Scheduling Hours

Reclaim gives you lots of controls over how and when certain kinds of events get scheduled. By configuring your hours in Reclaim, you can take control over how your meetings, focused work, and personal events get scheduled. It's a great way to ensure that you have nice buckets on your calendar for personal vs. work commitments.

Helpful guides

Productivity

Want to get more time for focused work during the week? Check out these features and capabilities to get you more time for heads-down progress on your priorities.

Habits

Habits are a great way to get more flexible, adaptive time for your work routines, which tend to be the foundation for a productive workweek. A great (and basic) example is to get time to catch up on email, but there are dozens more examples in Reclaim if you need inspiration.

Helpful guides

Tasks

Tasks give you the ability to merge your to-do list with your calendar and get time for your most important work projects. Reclaim also integrates with the project management and task management tools you already use, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Helpful guides

Scheduling Hours

Reclaim gives you lots of controls over how and when certain kinds of events get scheduled. By configuring your hours in Reclaim, you can take control over how your meetings, focused work, and personal events get scheduled. It's an awesome way to set up day theming (for example) directly in Reclaim without having to do it manually.

Helpful guides

Buffer Time

Getting breaks between meetings ensures you get a bit of time to focus and catch up throughout the workday Reclaim can automatically add time between events to ensure you always have the time you need to review notes after meetings, prep for the next meeting, and keep your head above water.

Helpful guides

Slack Status Sync

Your calendar isn't the only place where you get interrupted. Reclaim can automatically sync your Slack status with your calendar when you're heads-down on deep work, as well as set Do Not Disturb so that you don't lose your flow or have to constantly context-switch.

Helpful guides

No-meeting days

Making the most out of a no-meeting day requires not only that you block out your calendar to meetings, but that you also have a plan for how you want to spend the time. Reclaim gives you a special control that will block your time out for meetings, but still make time for your routines and to-dos during your no-meeting day.

Meeting management

Tired of manually coordinating meetings across timezones and preferences? Check out what Reclaim can do for your recurring and one-off meetings.

Scheduling Links

Coordinating meetings with external audiences can be really challenging -- not only because sharing your availability is hard, but also because you sometimes want to show more availability or prioritize urgent meetings, or tailor your availability to a particular attendee. Reclaim gives you special powers to help share your maximum availability with the right people using Scheduling Links.

Helpful guides

Smart 1:1s

1:1 meetings are one of the most common types of recurring event, and they can be a real pain to schedule and reschedule as things come up. With Smart 1:1s, you can automatically schedule your 1:1 meetings across timezones and preferences -- and prioritize the most important ones in real time.

Helpful guides

Scheduling Hours

Reclaim gives you lots of controls over how and when certain kinds of events get scheduled. By configuring your hours in Reclaim, you can take control over how your meetings, focused work, and personal events get scheduled. It's an awesome way to batch your meetings together or have meetings during optimal times of day without having to worry about the manual scheduling toil.

Helpful guides

Buffer Time

Getting breaks between meetings prevents you from being in endless back-to-backs all day. Reclaim can automatically add time between events to ensure you always have the time you need to review notes after meetings, prep for the next meeting, and keep your head above water.

Helpful guides

Integrating Reclaim

Want to make sure Reclaim is integrated with the places where you already work? Check out these guides to help you get Reclaim embedded into your workflows.

Task integrations

Reclaim integrates with a ton of project management and task managers to pull in your work from other platforms and automatically schedule it on your calendar.

Helpful guides

Slack integration

Reclaim's Slack integration gives you a ton of controls from Slack, as well as access to our Slack Status Sync feature that auto-syncs your Slack status with your calendar events.

Helpful guides

Add-ons and Extensions

Our Google Calendar Add-on gives you the power of Reclaim from within Google Calendar, and our Raycast Extension for MacOS users is an awesome way to have a command-bar-esque experience for Reclaim from anywhere on your computer.

Helpful Guides

Want a complete list of features in Reclaim instead? Check out the link to the doc below:

How do I get my team using Reclaim?

We offer a variety of resources to help you and your teams get the most out of Reclaim.

ROI and impact analysis

Want to help your team understand how much they can save by getting up to 40% more productive hours in the week? Check out our ROI calculator here, and punch in your team's size and average salary to get a sense of the cost benefits using Reclaim.

We're also happy to talk about providing a custom ROI analysis for teams of 5 or more. Reach out to [email protected] or send us a message in chat to learn more.

Data reports

We've surveyed thousands of professionals to learn about how productivity, work-life balance, meeting overload, and more are impacting their workweeks. Check out the reports below, and share them with your team to see if they resonate:

Webinars and personalized demos

Want to hop on a webinar? We hold one each week, and you can sign up here.

We also offer personalized demos and extended trials for teams of 5 or more. Reach out to [email protected] or send us a message in chat to learn more.

More resources

Browse the help center for more info on features and capabilities, check out the Reclaim YouTube channel for video walkthroughs, feature breakdowns, and tips, or tweet (X?) us @reclaimai.

If you have other questions, our support team is on standby to help via chat by clicking the Help tab in the app sidebar or via the Intercom button in the lower right hand corner. You can also reach us at [email protected].

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