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Overview: How Smart Meetings work, and how to create them
Overview: How Smart Meetings work, and how to create them

Smart Meetings make it easy for you to automatically schedule, reschedule, and manage your recurring meetings.

Updated over 4 months ago

What are Reclaim Smart Meetings?

Smart Meetings make it easy for you to automatically schedule, reschedule, and manage your recurring meetings.

Whether you need to make time for your regular one-on-ones, or weekly team syncs, you can create a new Smart Meeting in just few minutes, share a one-time invitation, and let Reclaim find the best time for all attendees to meet on a recurring basis around preferences and timezones – with automatic rescheduling when conflicts come up.

Why use Smart Meetings?

The average person spends 17.1 hours/week in meetings, but that’s after 4.2 get rescheduled and 3.5 are canceled. Scheduling is hard across when everyone on your team is busy – and important meetings (and relationships) all too often fall through the cracks.

With Smart Meetings, you can auto-schedule your recurring meetings at the best time for all attendees, using Reclaim's dynamic AI to navigate around everyones availability and priorities. And if a conflict comes up (like PTO, sick days, or another meeting), the meeting auto-reschedules to the next best time for the group.

It's amazing not to have to worry about scheduling anymore πŸ§˜β€β™‚οΈ

Dynamic scheduling

Smart Meetings take the work out of finding the best time for your recurring meetings.

Whether you're a manager juggling a dozen one-on-ones with direct reports, or a team lead trying to schedule several syncs – Smart Meetings dynamically finds the best time to connect around everyone's availability, and moves your recurring meetings as schedules change.

Automatically reschedule or skip

When a conflict comes up, you don't need to send back-and-forth communications to find a new time to connect.

1:1 Smart Meetings

Both the organizer and attendee of a one-on-one Smart Meeting can automatically reschedule the meeting to the next best time for everyone, or skip that meeting instance all together in just one click.

Group Smart Meetings

For Smart Meetings with 3+ attendees, you can rely on no-risk scheduling if Reclaim can't find any time for everyone to meet. Simply choose to leave your Smart Meetings on the calendar when Reclaim can't find time for them so you can manually make accommodations to reschedule.

This is really useful in cases where you're setting up a Smart Meeting that involves a ton of busy people, and want to ensure that the meeting doesn't get removed if it can't find time. Instead, Reclaim will just leave it at its ideal time, which means it won't disappear from the schedule.

Smart Free/Busy controls

Smart Meetings are initially scheduled as a Free event and will switch to Busy as your schedule changes to give maximum flexibility in your calendar – while still ensuring that you get the time you need.

Smart Meetings will automatically flip from Free to Busy when it's <24 hours ahead of their start time, or when there is only one slot remaining for the meeting within the same day. You can additionally opt to lock your Smart Meetings sooner to prevent them from rescheduling, which will also mark them as busy (learn about auto-lock settings here).

You can learn more about how Reclaim uses Free and Busy settings here.

Intelligent priority boosts

Smart Meetings help you find time for meetings that have been subject to conflicts and cancelations, so your lower-priority meetings don't fall through the cracks over the course of busy weeks. Reclaim does this by "boosting" the priority of lower-priority meetings if it detects that they've been skipped or missed for several weeks in a row.

For example, a Medium Priority weekly meeting will automatically be prioritized as a High Priority if missed the previous week, and then Critical Priority if missed two weeks in a row.


Creating a new Smart Meeting

You can easily create a new Smart Meeting in the Reclaim app to start automatically scheduling your recurring one-on-one meeting around your preferences:

  1. Navigate to your Smart Meetings page in the app.

  2. Click the + New Smart Meeting button in the upper right corner of the page.

  3. Fill out the scheduling rules requested in each field.

  4. Click Create to send your one-time invitation to the attendee(s) and start scheduling the meeting across both people's calendars.

Converting existing recurring meetings into Smart Meetings

You can also quickly convert detected recurring meetings on your calendar to a Smart Meeting to start auto-scheduling.

Select the 'Detected' tab and click on the detected meeting you want to automate – it just takes a few minutes to set up.

Reclaim will pull in the frequency of detected one-on-one meetings as well as their regularly-scheduled time and duration. You can adjust all these settings these before finalizing the meeting.

Assuming Reclaim has access to the other attendee's calendar, the Smart Meeting will start scheduling within a few seconds. If not, it will be left in the pending state until the attendee has provided sufficient permissions.

If you're not the meeting organizer

You can also see detected meetings that you are not the organizer of. You can select the meeting to send an invite to the organizer so they can convert it to a Smart Meeting, or copy the invite URL and send it to them directly.

The organizer will receive an email invite to convert their meeting with a quick and easy onboarding.


Smart Meetings scheduling rules

When you create a new Smart Meeting, you will see a form where you can fill out your scheduling preferences for how you want the event to schedule in the calendar.

Meeting name

Give your meeting a name. This is how the event will show on all attendees' calendars.

Attendees

Search the attendees you want to invite to this meeting, your scheduling Hours, and who is a required attendee. You'll be able to see the timezone of each attendee.

If the attendee is not a Reclaim user, enter the email of the attendee to send a one-time invitation to get the Smart Meeting set up. Check out this doc for more information about who can be invited to a Smart Meeting.

Tip: You can set attendees to optional to exclude them from being considered for a Smart Meeting, which gives you flexibility in cases where you have a meeting that includes a couple of people with very busy schedules.

Hours

You can choose in which time ranges you want to be available for Reclaim to schedule your meeting. Choose between your Working, Meeting, or Personal Hours (predefined in your Hours settings), or set Custom Hours for your Smart Meeting with specific days you want the meeting to be scheduled on and/or multiple time ranges for a single day.

Reclaim will honor preferences between you and your attendees' meeting hours and only schedule events that fit those preferences. For example, if one of you doesn't like to meet on Wednesdays and has set that in your meeting hours settings, Reclaim won't ever schedule a Smart Meeting on Wednesdays.

When editing and viewing a Smart Meeting, you can now clearly see the timezone of each attendee and the overlapping hours (or lack thereof) of all required attendees. You can also manage hours for the invitee to resolve low-overlap meetings.

Frequency

Set the frequency at which you'd like to meet for your Smart Meeting and the ideal day.

  • Every day: Schedule on all days of the week

  • Weekly: Scheduled on any days of the week

  • Monthly: Schedule any date or weekday of the month

  • Custom: Schedule any number of days, weeks, or months

Meeting duration

Set a meeting duration for the minimum and maximum time you'd like to meet. For example, you can set a meeting to be at least 30m and no more than 45m if you want it to flex around busy weeks.

Ideal time

You can set your ideal time to meet, and Reclaim will schedule the meeting as close to that ideal time while staying within the overlapping hours between you and your attendees.

Starting

By default, Reclaim will schedule your Smart Meetings ASAP, but you can override this value and have the meeting start scheduling later. You can also use this setting in the future to 'pause' your Smart Meetings until a later date!

Priority

The priority at which you want Reclaim to defend the Smart Meeting around your other events. By default, new Smart Meetings are set to High priority (P2).

Note: Keep in mind that that only the organizer can set and edit the priority of the event across all attendees' calendars.

Learn more about prioritizing your Smart Meetings in this doc.

If your Smart Meeting can't be scheduled...

Reclaim gives you the ability to leave Smart Meetings on the calendar when it can't find time for them.

This is really useful in cases where you're setting up a Smart Meeting that involves a ton of busy people, and want to ensure that the meeting doesn't get removed if it can't find time. Instead, Reclaim will just leave it at its ideal time, which means it won't disappear from the schedule.

You'll see a ⚠️ emoji on events that Reclaim left on the calendar after being unable to find time for them.

Description

Add a description to the meeting that will be included in all recurring meeting events on the calendar. This is useful for a link to a rolling agenda or notes and also supports markdown formatting.

Other details

Videoconferencing / location

If your meeting is remote, you can add a Zoom or Google Meet link. This will automatically generate and add videoconference link for all your recurring Smart Meeting calendar events.

If you want to use a physical location you can also add it here. If you have a different videoconferencing link you want to use, you can also paste it in the location field.

Additionally, you can choose from your Google Workspace resources to set conference rooms as the location for your Smart Meetings.

If you want to opt for no videoconferencing or location, you can do so too.

Tip: you can also schedule the Smart Meeting with no location added, and then add it afterwards via Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar (Outlook support in early beta). Learn more

Target calendar

Select which calendar you want these Smart Meeting events to schedule on. For Smart Meetings, the calendar no longer has to be your main account in Reclaim, but it still needs to be the primary calendar, not a sub-calendar. This is great for setting up meetings for different corporate identities if you're consulting, for example.

Note: The target calendar can only be changed upon creation of a new Smart Meetings series.

Dependencies

Set dependencies for how Smart Meetings and Habits schedule relative to each other.

For example, you could have a "prep for weekly team meeting" Habit always come before the weekly Smart Meeting. Or, you could make sure your exercise Habit never comes after your Lunch Habit, or that you never do two specific Habits on the same day.


How Reclaim schedules Smart Meetings

Prioritization

You can set universal Priorities for everything on your calendar from Critical (P1) to Low priority (P4). Reclaim will schedule your Smart Meetings according to the priority level you set, around other events on the calendar.

Setting the priority level for your Smart Meetings lets you drive smarter, more flexible scheduling for your busy calendar. Higher-priority meetings will be prioritized first, and can overbook lower-priority Smart Meetings, as well as Habits and Tasks so you always have time for your most important meetings.

You can learn more about Priorities for your Smart Meetings in this doc.

Availability

After considering priority of your meeting and the other events you're making time for, Reclaim will schedule Smart Meetings around when both attendees are available.

If you're finding that your Smart Meetings isn't scheduling, it may be that your preferences aren't allowing for sufficient overlap between schedules. Read here for more info.

Timezones

Reclaim will automatically detect timezones for you and your attendee for Smart Meetings and schedule across them. If you're having issues with your timezone, check out this doc for troubleshooting tips.

Does the invitee need to be a Reclaim user?

Smart Meetings can be set up with anyone! The other person does not need to be a Reclaim user. Generally if your Smart Meeting is with another member of your organization, they won't need to sign up for Reclaim in order for Reclaim to schedule the meeting.

Depending on their calendar privacy and whether you have access, your invitees might have to sign up. Learn more about who can be invited to a Smart Meetings in this doc.

How Smart Meetings show up on the calendar

Smart Meetings will appear up on your calendar as normal calendar events. You can modify them, RSVP to them, and delete them as you would any other event. Reclaim will respond to those changes as inputs to reschedule or skip the Smart Meeting event.

Here's an example of what a Smart Meeting event might look like on Google Calendar:

Or what it might look like on an Outlook Calendar (Outlook support in early beta):

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