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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 2 weeks 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 inspire 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 in the corner to talk with us.

What is Reclaim?

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

Your calendar plays a huge role in determining what you focus on. But too often, it gets filled with whatever’s loudest or most recent, rather than what’s actually important. It’s not that we don’t know our priorities – it’s that our calendars don’t. They lack the context to make intelligent, intentional decisions about how our time should be spent.

Reclaim changes that. By understanding your unique preferences and goals, it automatically defends time for focused work, personal routines, and key meetings, and dynamically adapts as things shift. At the end of the day, we know you’ve got a lot on your plate, and manually managing a constantly changing calendar isn’t the best use of your time. Reclaim helps you automate the busywork so you can focus on the high-value work that actually moves things forward.

What makes Reclaim different?

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 weeks.

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 manually wrangling our calendars to find time for what mattered most. That experience gave us a deep understanding of how hard it is to protect time for focus, manage competing priorities, and stay agile amidst constant change.

Reclaim is designed to tackle the real-world challenges busy professionals face, helping you make time for deep work, habits, and effective meetings – whether you’re using Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar.

Below, we'll dive into those challenges and how Reclaim helps you solve them:

Flexible automation

You can plan the “perfect” schedule on Sunday night but that plan collides with reality as the workweek begins: new meetings, shifting priorities, and unexpected conflicts. Manually reshuffling your calendar to keep up isn’t just exhausting – it’s a waste of your time.

Traditional time blocking isn't built for the challenges real-world professionals deal with. Reclaim uses intelligent automation to keep your calendar agile, adjusting events in real time as your week unfolds. Whether it’s focus time, habits, tasks, or important meetings, Reclaim continuously finds the best times for your priorities, reschedules when needed, and resolves conflicts as they happen.

And automation doesn’t mean giving up control. You’re always in the driver’s seat with the ability to make executive decisions on your calendar anytime. Reclaim just handles the busywork so you can stay focused — and keep your momentum going.

Smart prioritization

There are weeks where you’ve got more on your plate than you realistically have time to finish. That’s not a planning problem – it’s a prioritization challenge.

Reclaim helps you stay focused on what matters most by using a smart prioritization matrix across your entire calendar. You can assign priorities to everything – tasks, meetings, habits, personal routines, and even events created outside of Reclaim. As your week fills up and plans shift, Reclaim automatically makes intelligent tradeoffs on your behalf, adjusting your schedule so that the highest-value work always gets time.

Instead of playing calendar Tetris, you get a schedule that reflects what’s most important – and adapts when priorities change.

Practical integration

Let’s face it: there are too many calendar and to-do apps out there. Your company probably uses several, and you might have a few personal favorites too. That’s why Reclaim is built to work with the tools you already know and love.

Reclaim integrates seamlessly with your existing Outlook and Google calendars and project management platforms, naturally extending into the places where you already do your work. You don’t need to adopt a whole new calendar interface or start your productivity journey from scratch – instead, you can leverage the tasks, meetings, and routines you've already captured elsewhere and automate them on your schedule via Reclaim.


Who is Reclaim for?

Reclaim is trusted by hundreds of thousands of busy professionals across more than 60,000 companies. From engineering and sales to marketing and operations, teams of all kinds rely on Reclaim to take control of their calendars and stay focused on what matters most.

Reclaim for individuals

Reclaim helps you make time for what matters most across both work and life. Think of it as a full-time assistant for your calendar, automatically managing your schedule so you don’t have to constantly manually tweak and rearrange it.

You stay flexible enough to meet with important internal and external contacts, while still protecting the focused time you need to move your priorities forward.

Reclaim for teams

When used on your team, Reclaim ensures everyone’s schedule is optimized across time zones, availability, and personal priorities and preferences.

It manages internal meetings, helps each team member maximize productivity, and provides clear context on what everyone is working on with integration like Slack Status Sync. Plus, it automatically resolves meeting conflicts as plans change, making the entire team more agile and adaptive in how they spend their time so everyone can show up at their best.

Reclaim for companies

When adopted company-wide, Reclaim can transform the culture of work by giving everyone more time back in their workweeks. By creating schedules that are both automated and flexible, employees spend less time managing their calendars and more time focused on what truly moves the needle.

And it's not just about doing more. With features like team Habit templates to encourage time for a daily lunch, Buffers to encourage regular breaks, and set Hours to prevent overtime – companies can holistically empower employees to perform at their best. Reclaim ensures time is dedicated to priorities across work and life, fostering a culture of productivity, focus, and healthier work-life balance.


How do I get started with Reclaim?

Reclaim offers powerful tools to help you take control of your calendar. Whether you're looking to improve your productivity, reduce meeting overload, or better protect work-life balance, we'll help you figure out where to start based on what matters most to you.

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

Productivity

Looking to get more time for productive work each week? Explore these features designed to help you carve out uninterrupted time for deep work and make real progress on your top priorities.

Focus

Focus time helps you block out uninterrupted periods for your most important work around everything else. Simply set an hourly weekly focus goal, select your scheduling mode, and Reclaim ensures the time you need to move your priorities forward and prevents you from being overrun with meetings.

Learn more about Focus:

Habits (for work)

Habits are a great way to get more flexible, adaptive time for your work routines. For example, having time to catch up on email every morning, or an hour for a healthy lunch during the day. Create a Habit from scratch, or get started with 130+ customizable templates if you need inspiration.

Learn more about Habits:

Tasks

Tasks bridge the gap between your to-do list and your calendar so you have the time you need for important work projects before deadlines come up. Reclaim also integrates with the project management and task management tools you already use, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Learn more about Tasks:

Slack Status Sync

Your calendar isn't the only place where you get interrupted. Reclaim can automatically sync your Slack status with your calendar so your team knows when you're heads-down on deep work or in an important meeting. For max protection, you can optionally set up advanced Do Not Disturb settings so that you don't lose your flow or have to constantly context-switch.

Learn more about the Slack integration:

Custom Hours

Reclaim gives you lots of controls over how and when certain kinds of events get scheduled. By configuring your Work, Meeting, and Personal hours in Reclaim, you can take control of your calendar. Custom Hours are also an awesome way to set up automatic day theming for your week.

Helpful guides

Work-life balance

Want to improve your work-life balance and make sure you are reaching your personal goals? These features are designed to help — because wellness and productivity go hand in hand:

Habits (for life)

Habits help you make time for your personal routines in a smarter, more adaptive way. Whether it’s stepping out for a walk, fitting in regular workouts, meditating, or spending time with family – Habits ensure your routines stay protected on the calendar, even as your week evolves. Choose from 130+ pre-built templates to get started or create your own personal Habit from scratch.

Learn more about Habits:

Hours

Reclaim gives you full control over when your work happens by letting you define your working hours. By setting clear boundaries for your schedule, you can ensure that meetings, focus time, and tasks are automatically kept within the workday – so your evenings and personal time stay protected. It’s a powerful way to prevent overtime and create a more sustainable rhythm between work and life.

Learn more about Scheduling Hours:

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 and preventing double bookings.

Learn more about Calendar Sync

Buffer Time

Getting breaks between meetings and work sessions is key to reducing fatigue, and making time to travel to on-site events is just as important. Reclaim automatically adds buffers between events so you’re not rushing, overwhelmed, or running on empty.

Learn more about Buffer Time:

No-meeting days

Making the most of a no-meeting day takes more than just blocking off your calendar – it requires a clear plan for how you’ll use that time. Reclaim’s No Meeting Days feature helps you do both: it automatically defends your day from meetings while still making a plan for your Focus Time, Habits, and Tasks so you can stay productive and intentional with your time.

Learn more about setting up a No-Meeting Day:

Meeting management

Tired of juggling time zones, preferences, and back-and-forths to book meetings? See how Reclaim simplifies both recurring meetings and one-off scheduling.

Scheduling Links

Coordinating meetings with external attendees isn’t always straightforward — especially when you need to prioritize urgent conversations, adjust availability, or tailor details to specific attendees. Reclaim’s Scheduling Links give you powerful, flexible controls to share your availability exactly how you want, so it’s easier to connect with the right people, faster.

Learn more about Scheduling Links:

Smart Meetings

Meetings are one of the most common (and frustrating) events to manually manage on a calendar. With Smart Meetings, Reclaim takes the hassle out of scheduling recurring meetings by automatically finding the best time for everyone on the invite, across time zones and preferences. Prioritize your most important meetings to ensure they always get booked, and let Reclaim auto-reschedule when conflicts arise — no extra coordination required.

Learn more about Smart Meetings:

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:

Slack integration

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

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 docs:


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 with 1000+ stats below, and share them with your team to see if they resonate:

Webinars and personalized demos

Want to hop on a webinar? Check out our upcoming live events and register to join us.

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 tag is on X @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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