Smart Meetings schedule around you and your attendees's mutual availability, timezones, and Hours.
If you're finding that a Smart Meetings isn't scheduling, or if you're seeing a conflict warning on your event – the most common culprit is limited availability. Let's take a look at how to troubleshoot your Smart Meeting scheduling.
How to create more availability for Smart Meetings
Smart Meetings make it easy to auto-schedule recurring meetings at the best time for everyone on the invite. Depending on preferences, time zones, and availability – it's possible there will be instances where Reclaim can't find time for everyone to meet around the preferences you've set for the Smart Meeting. If there's an issue with a meeting, you'll see it highlighted in the 'Needs attention' tab.
There are a few ways to troubleshoot this issue and create more availability for your Smart Meeting to schedule.
Adjust hours
When viewing your Smart Meeting in Reclaim, you'll see an availability map across all the attendees hours and timezones. This gives a visual representation of overlap across everyone's calendar.
If you are the organizer of the meeting, there are a two ways to adjust the hours for the meeting if there isn't enough overlap (green):
Contact your attendees and ask them to expand their meeting hours in Reclaim.
If you've customized 'One-off' meeting times for attendees, make sure both the organizer and attendee have overlapping hours.
Optimize availability
If there is overlap across hours but the Smart Meeting is still having difficulty scheduling, it's likely due to a lack of availability across everyone's busy calendar. There are a few ways to create more flexibility for your Smart Meetings to schedule:
Priority settings
As the organizer of the meeting, you are in control of the priority setting for that meeting across everyone's calendar. If you're finding that the meeting isn't scheduling, consider turning up the level of the event. Alternatively, review the rest of your Smart Meetings to see if you have too many competing high-priority events during the week.
You can learn more about how Priorities work for Smart Meetings in this doc.
Optional attendees
You can set attendees to 'Optional' by toggling the stay (*) icon. Setting an attendee to optional will exclude their availability from being considered when Reclaim schedules a Smart Meeting.
This gives you more flexibility in cases where you have a meeting that includes people with super packed schedules, or those attendees who don't have to be there.
Optional attendees will still be included on the meeting invite as a 'Maybe' RSVP. That way, they can make the executive decision to adjust their calendar to attend, or just have the reassurance that the meeting was scheduled if they don't need to be there.
Min/max duration
You can set a minimum and maximum duration for your Smart Meetings to allow more flexibility to touch base on busy weeks. For example, you can set a meeting to be ideally be 1 hour (max), but you might be happy to connect for just 15 minutes rather than miss the meeting altogether (min).
Reclaim will try to book the max time but, say, if only 20 minutes are available across all attendees schedules that week – it'll lock in that time so the meeting can still happen.
No-risk automatic scheduling
Auto-scheduling your recurring meetings doesn't mean events just fall through the cracks if Reclaim can't find a time for them.
You can set your Smart Meetings to stay on the calendar when Reclaim can't find time for them. These events will be scheduled at the ideal time and marked with a warning emoji (⚠️) so you can take action to either accommodate the meeting, or cancel it.
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 Reclaim can't find time for that instance.
Change log
Additionally, you can always select 'View change log' on any Smart Meeting event and get a deeper look to see why it got rescheduled or skipped due to a conflict.
Email notifications
You can also manage the email notifications you and/or your attendees receive for Smart Meetings so you're always on top of scheduling updates:
At-Risk Smart Meetings: A daily digest of upcoming Smart Meetings that are at risk of not being scheduled in the next 2 weeks.
New Meetings Detected (coming soon): Receive an email every 2 weeks when Reclaim finds new recurring meetings on your calendar that could be converted to Smart Meetings.
Send Updates for Meeting Changes: Notify attendees when meetings are moved, rescheduled, or canceled using standard Google Calendar notification emails.
