Focus Time (currently in private beta) is the easiest way to carve out more productive hours in your week for heads-down work.
The best part about Focus Time is that you don’t have to commit to time blocking specific events in advance. It proactively ensures you have the time you need around meetings for all the independent work that matters.
🚀 Focus Time is currently in private beta. If you'd like to request access to try it out, please contact [email protected].
What is Focus Time?
Focus Time works by defending smart blocks of time on your calendar for productive, independent work. You can leave Focus as generic blocks to stay agile around shifting priorities, or use Focus in tandem with Reclaim’s smart Habits and Tasks to create a more concrete daily plan.
Whichever way you use Focus – it helps you defend time from meetings, reduce distractions, and get more done every week.
How to set up Focus Time in Reclaim
Getting started with Focus Time takes less than a minute:
Head to the Focus page to activate the beta.
Decide how you want Focus time scheduled on your calendar, and what your goal(s) are for your workweek.
Optionally customize the title and description of your Focus Time calendar events.
Adjust your scheduling settings (more on each setting below).
Complete the onboarding and Focus Time will start scheduling on your calendar, so you always have the time you need to get things done.
Focus time modes
There are two ways that Reclaim can schedule Focus Time on your calendar, which accommodates different styles of schedules and time defense. You'll see these options when setting up Focus Time.
Automatically defend Focus Time on my calendar
In this mode, you set a weekly goal for your Focus Time and Reclaim will progressively fill up your calendar ahead of time to try and help you hit that goal.
With this mode, you'll notice that Reclaim will start scheduling Focus regardless of how full or empty your calendar is. You can think of it as a more proactive Focus mode that comes at the expense of availability.
There are several key settings in this mode:
Weekly Focus Time goal: the number of Focus hours you want each week.
Ideal duration per day: the ideal number of Focus hours you want per day.
Max duration per day: the max number of Focus hours you want per day.
Event duration min/max: the minimum and maximum event duration that you want for Focus blocks.
Only defend Focus Time when my week gets too full
In this mode, you can set a weekly and/or daily target for Focus, and Reclaim will only start blocking time for Focus when you are at risk of missing that minimum.
With this mode, you'll notice that Reclaim won't schedule Focus until your calendar starts to fill up. You can think of it as a more reactive Focus mode that optimizes for availability over time defense, keeping you flexible for meetings until you run out of time.
Title, Hours, Description, and Auto-Decline Settings
You can use titles, descriptions, and auto-decline to communicate context to your colleagues or teammates about your Focus Time.
Event title: this is the title and emoji that will be used on Focus events in your calendar.
Hours: these are the Hours that your Focus events will be scheduled during.
Event description: this is the description that will show on Focus events.
Auto-decline: optionally decide whether you want to auto-decline meetings that interrupt your Focus Time, and send a message to the organizer who invited you.
You can always adjust these settings later.
How does Focus work on the calendar?
Like all Reclaim smart events, Focus Time blocks help you defend the time you need while staying flexible. Focus blocks intelligently reschedule to the next best time – just like Habits and Tasks – adapting around higher-priority items and meetings.
Focus Time will automatically reschedule when interrupted by another event that you RSVP yes to.
When you move a Focus event on your calendar, it will automatically lock and stop moving, even if it's interrupted by another event.
When you delete a Focus event on your calendar, Reclaim won't try to schedule Focus into that time range and treat it as a "skip".
How Focus is prioritized relative to other Reclaim events
Focus Time is prioritized a little differently than your other Reclaim smart events (learn more about how Priorities work in Reclaim here):
Habits, Tasks, and Smart Meetings will schedule before Focus Time blocks, regardless of priority levels. This allows you to fill 'extra' time with Focus to meet your goals, and create a more concrete plan with other smart features if you're using those.
Scheduling Links will see Focus Time events as High Priority, meaning that only Critical Scheduling Links will show those slots as available times to meet.
What counts towards your Focus goal?
If you do use other smart features to make time for heads-down work, Focus Time will automatically count work Tasks, Habits, and other Focus Time events that you manually create in Google Calendar toward your Focus Time goals.
You can also add the hashtag #focus to the description or title of any event on your calendar to count it towards your Focus goal.
This means Reclaim seamlessly accounts for the time you’re already dedicating to deep work, giving you a more accurate and effortless way to protect and measure your focus hours each week.
We can’t wait to hear what you think about Focus Time! Please share any feedback to help us improve the feature with the team at the via the live chat in the app.