Reclaim's Calendar Sync feature allows you to stay on top of all your separate schedules by intelligently copying and duplicating events to a primary calendar — so you can manage your actual availability and keep your work-life balance intact.
Create a new sync policy
Setting up a new sync policy is simple:
Navigate to the Calendar Sync page.
In the top right, click + New Sync.
Select the source account and associated calendar (where you want to sync events from).
Select the destination account and associated calendar (where you want to sync events to).
Click the Next: Preferences button.
Customize your sync policy with color preferences, visibility settings, & how you want events to sync (more details below).
Click the Start Syncing button finish setup.
Reclaim will now automatically sync events from your source calendar to your target calendar, and update those events if details change so you don't have to manually make adjustments.
Customizing your sync policy
Reclaim offers a ton of ways to customize how events get synced across calendars for each sync policy. Below, we'll detail how to take advantage of these customizations.
Color, category, and type
You can customize the type of a calendar that you've synced to Reclaim as well as set a color for all events that come from a source calendar. This is especially useful if you have multiple separate calendars you want to identify by color.
Calendar type
The Calendar Type determines what kinds of events Reclaim will look for and color-code using your color coding settings. Reclaim offers three Calendar Types for your synced calendars — Business, Personal, and Travel:
Business: Reclaim will categorize and color-code 'External Meeting', 'One-on-One', 'Solo Work', and 'Travel & Logistics' events.
Personal: Reclaim will categorize and color-code 'Personal' and 'Travel & Logistics' events.
Travel: Reclaim will categorize and color-code 'Travel & Logistics' events.
To change the Calendar Type of a sync policy:
Navigate to the Calendar Sync page.
Click on the sync policy you want to modify.
Select Business, Personal, or Travel.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save changes.
Override the color for synced events
Sometimes, you may want to just assign a single color to all events from a synced calendar to make it easy to distinguish which calendar each synced event belongs. For example, if you have three source calendars that are all syncing to a single destination calendar, you may want to set each to be a different color.
When overriding the color for a synced calendar, Reclaim will bypass your default set color settings, and instead will set all events from the source calendar using the selected single color you pick in the sync policy settings.
Note: Reclaim will still use the Calendar Type to classify events, which means that your Reclaim stats will accurately reflect how your time is split across different categories.
To override the color for a synced calendar
Navigate to Calendar Sync.
Click on the sync policy you want to modify.
Scroll to the section labeled Color.
Click Choose color.
Select a color for synced copies from this calendar.
Scroll down and click Save changes.
Privacy and visibility settings
We believe that a great calendar communicates just enough context to people who want to book time with you. Rather than limiting you to the privacy options provided by Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar, we've created a variety of ways for you to show details of synced event copies on destination calendars.
Changing visibility options for synced events
Navigate to the Calendar Sync page.
Click the Sync Policy you want to update.
Scroll down to the Visibility section.
Select from the list of privacy setting options.
Click Save changes.
Note: Visibility options are available on our Starter plan and above. Customers on the free Lite plan will only have the option of Personal Commitment for all or Work Commitment for all.
How each visibility setting works
Let's take a look at the differences between different visibility setting options for your calendar sync policies:
Personal / Work / Travel Commitment
Synced events on your destination calendar will show that you're busy for either a Work/Travel/Personal Commitment - depending on the selected Calendar Type - and will make them publicly visible to others who view your destination calendar. The idea is to show people that you're busy for something specific, but without giving away all the details of the source event.
Be sure to select the Calendar Type so your privacy options properly reflect the kind of events being synced.
| Personal | Work | Travel |
Vacation | ✅ PTO |
|
|
Travel | ✅ Travel | ✅ Travel | ✅ Travel |
Flight | ✅ Flight | ✅ Flight | ✅ Flight |
Meeting |
| ✅ Meeting |
|
Solo Work |
| ✅ Work Commitment |
|
Everything else | ✅ Personal Commitment | ✅ Work Commitment | ✅ Travel |
Note: as shown in the table above, Reclaim will sync over vacation events, travel events, meetings and flights using specific titles (i.e., "PTO" for Vacation, "Travel" for travel, "Flight" for flights, and "Meeting" for meetings). This is to help convey a bit more context to your colleagues.
Busy for all
People who view your destination calendar will see synced events show as Busy, with no other details. This setting is most similar to setting your Google or Outlook Calendar to private so that people can't see any details of the events on your schedule.
Event details only for you, busy to most others
This setting will mark the synced event as private, meaning others will just see it as busy, but will allow you to see all the event's details including the description, location, and video/audio conference details.
Note: if you've given others "make changes to events" permissions for your calendar in Google as outlined here, they will see all the event's details. IT administrators in your company may also be able to see these events.
Event details for you and those with access, otherwise busy
This is the same as above, except using your default privacy settings in Google Calendar. This offers up the option to keep your events private from most people, but still visible to anyone you've shared calendar details with.
Syncing all-day events
You can configure Calendar Sync to sync all-day events between calendars, but by default Reclaim will skip them. This guide will show you how to configure sync policies to sync all-day events, and also explain a bit about how all-day events work.
What are all-day events, and how do they work?
All-day events are typically used for two purposes in calendars:
To block availability for an all-day event (e.g., a vacation or PTO event)
To set a reminder that doesn't block your availability (e.g., a birthday)
All-day events appear in Google Calendar at the very top of your calendar view, and look something like this:
By default, when all-day events are created in Google Calendar, they get marked as free time. This means that they won't block your availability. However, you can opt to change their status to "busy", which will block your availability for the entire day(s) for which that all-day event is active.
This is also true for Outlook Calendar:
Sync all-day events using Calendar Sync
Reclaim will skip syncing all-day events by default, but you can opt to sync them in your sync policy settings. Here's how to do it, and how it works.
Go to Calendar Sync in the Reclaim app.
Click on any of the sync policies that you want to enable all-day events for.
Scroll down until you see "All-day events".
You can select one of three options, as shown above:
Don't sync all-day events (default): this will skip syncing all-day events entirely.
Sync only all-day events marked busy: this will sync all-day events that are marked as busy, but will continue to skip all-day events that are marked as free.
Sync all all-day events: this will sync all all-day events, regardless of whether they're marked free or busy.
Once you've selected the option you'd like, hit "Save changes" and you'll see your all-day events get synced in just a few moments.
Syncing events around your working hours
If you want to ensure that you never get overbooked on a calendar for events from other calendars – including on the weekends or evenings – we highly recommend syncing events at all times.
However, you might have a calendar like a side gig or another work calendar that you only want to sync events from during your working hours (learn more about setting up your scheduling hours in this doc).
Reclaim makes it easy to set preferences for each sync policy that work for you.
Set hours for when Calendar Sync events are copied
You can modify this preference on a per-sync-policy basis (learn more about managing and editing your sync policies in this doc).
For example, you might have a calendar syncing to your work calendar for a side gig that you don't need to sync outside of your working hours. You might also have a personal calendar that you do want to sync outside of your working hours. You can set that preference differently in those two sync policies.
To set when events get synced
Navigate to the Calendar Sync page in Reclaim.
Click on the Sync Policy that you want to modify.
Scroll down to 'Sync outside of working hours?'
Use the toggle on the right to turn on or off this feature.
Click Save changes (if modifying) or Start syncing (if creating a new Sync Policy).
Syncing multiple calendars
Calendar Sync makes it easy to sync all of your calendars so you don't have to juggle a bunch of schedules. You can create additional sync policies across different calendars to customize a workflow that works best for you.
Learn more about setting up bidirectional sync policies between multiple calendars in this doc.