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How Reclaim uses Priorities to intelligently plan your workweek
How Reclaim uses Priorities to intelligently plan your workweek

Learn how to prioritize Reclaim and non-Reclaim events on your calendar to make time for your most important work first.

Updated over 4 months ago

With Priorities, you can take control of all the events on your calendar – both Reclaim-created smart events and non-Reclaim events (like meetings created in Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar) – you can build out a plan around what's most important every week, and automatically make tradeoffs with lower-priority items when necessary.

Set the priority level for your Habits, Tasks, Smart Meetings, Scheduling Links, and even Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar events from Critical (P1) to Low priority (P4) and Reclaim will auto-schedule your calendar around the things that are most important.

Priorities overview

Reclaim allows you to assign universal Priorities to everything on your calendar – both smart Reclaim events and non-Reclaim events (ex. a recurring team standup) – so you can prioritize your most important meetings and focus work sessions in the workweek.

Prioritization levels:

There are four priority levels you can set for the events on your calendar:

  • Critical (P1): Reclaim will schedule Critical items before any other events, and these can overbook lower-priority items as your calendar books up.

  • High priority (P2): High priority events will be prioritized before medium and low priority events, and can be overbooked by critical events.

  • Medium priority (P3): Medium priority events will be prioritized before low priority events, and can be overbooked by medium-critical priority events.

  • Low priority (P4): Low priority events will be prioritized last, around your availability, and can be overbooked by higher-priority items.

Reclaim will always try to get time for your most critical items in priority order, but also leverages smart AI scheduling to ensure that your lower-priority items get scheduled accounting for flexibility and due dates of Tasks.

For example, a P2 Task with a due date that is further out might end up scheduling after a P3 Task that is due in the next couple days.

How Priorities work

Your Critical (P1) Smart Meetings, and Habits will always take top billing, and Reclaim auto-schedules the rest by priority and due date – intelligently ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

If your smart events have the same priority level, Reclaim will prioritize scheduling your Smart Meetings, first, Habits second, and Tasks third based on your availability.

Habits

Higher-priority Habits schedule before lower-priority Habits, Tasks, and Smart Meetings, events. As your calendar books up, higher-priority Habits can overbook lower-priority items to make sure you have time for your important routines.

Smart Meetings

Higher-priority Smart Meetings, schedule before lower-priority Smart Meetings, Habits, and Tasks. As your calendar books up, higher-priority Smart Meetings can overbook lower-priority items to make sure you have time for your important one-on-one meetings.

Tasks

Higher-priority Tasks schedule before lower-priority Tasks, Habits, and Smart Meetings. As your calendar books up, higher-priority Tasks can overbook lower-priority items to make sure you have time to get work done.

Reclaim considers priority, flexibility, and due dates when scheduling Tasks. For example, a High priority Task with a due date that is further out might end up scheduling after a Medium priority Task that is due in the next couple days.

Tasks with the same priority level will be prioritized based on soonest due date.

Priorities for Tasks also features 'Up Next' capabilities which can override priority levels and schedule certain to-dos ASAP.

Scheduling Links

Priorities for Scheduling Links work a little different. Higher-priority links will show lower-priority Habits, Tasks, Smart Meeting events, and non-Reclaim events on the calendar as available time slots, so you can offer your most availability for important meetings.

Scheduling Link meeting events on your calendar will never be overbooked by any Reclaim event, regardless of priority level.

Prioritizing non-Reclaim created events

One of the most powerful features of Priorities is that you can also prioritize non-Reclaim events (ex. recurring internal team meetings, standups, etc.) to offer up your maximum availability for important meetings.

Important things to note:

  • All non-Reclaim events on your calendar will always be set to P1 by default (most critical) so they will never be overbooked by Reclaim – unless you manually change their priority level.

  • Your non-Reclaim events manually set to a lower priority level can only ever be overbooked by higher-priority Scheduling Links which will show that time as available – non-Reclaim events will never be overscheduled by Habits, Tasks, or Smart Meetings, regardless of their priority.

Learn more about Priorities for non-Reclaim events here: Prioritizing your non-Reclaim created events →

Managing your Priorities

Priorities are designed to be flexible and adaptable as your schedule changes, so you can reprioritize smart events to reflect what’s most important right now. Here's how you can manage and edit the Priorities of your Reclaim events:

Planner Priorities overview

You can see an overview of your Priorities in your Planner in the right-side menu – under each of the four priority levels, and sorted by feature category.

Each of your Reclaim events will be tagged with a priority level, indicated by the ‘bar’ icon to the right. You can change the priority of that event by clicking on the 'bar' icon 📶 and setting a new priority.

Or by dragging-and-dropping the event into a different priority level.

Priorities page

You can also manage your priorities in a side-by-side view from the Priorities page.

Just like in the Planner, you can click on the bar icon to set a new priority for the event, or drag-and-drop to reprioritize your Reclaim events.

You can also use settings for your Priorities page to filter the view by event type or Scheduling Hours by clicking the 'sort' icon in the top right of the Priorities page.

To adjust the column width of your page, click the 'gear' icon and slide to adjust.

Note for Mac users: If at wider view settings your Priorities columns get cut off to the right of the page, and you do not see a slider at the bottom of the page — check your Mac System Preferences under General > 'Show scroll bars'. Set this to 'Show always' to reveal the scroll bar.

Google Calendar add-on

You can also view your events by priority level and feature category directly in Google Calendar via the free Reclaim add-on. Click on any scheduled smart event on the calendar, or select it from the add-on sidebar, to view more details.

You can update to the priority level of your Tasks and Habits directly in the add-on by clicking 'Edit' on an item to pull up the editor module where you can adjust the priority.

The priority of your Smart Meetings, Scheduling Links, and non-Reclaim created events can only be edited from the Reclaim app.


Priorities FAQ

How do I prioritize Tasks using this system?

Priorities offer more control over how your tasks are prioritized with even more granular settings. Rather than having to stack-rank your entire task list, Reclaim considers the priority level, availability, and deadline when auto-scheduling them in your calendar. Learn more about prioritizing your Tasks here.

Additionally, you can leverage the ‘Up Next’ feature in the Planner to tell Reclaim which select items you want to work on next – overriding priority levels. ‘Up Next’ tasks will be prioritized in order. Learn how to use Up Next for Tasks here.

Will Reclaim schedule over my Google Calendar or Outlook events, like other work meetings?

Not unless you want it to! All non-Reclaim events on your calendar will be tagged as Critical (P1) by default and will never be overscheduled by Habits, Tasks, or Smart Meetings no matter what their priority level is.

The only time Reclaim will schedule over a non-Reclaim created event (like a Google Calendar/Outlook meeting or another event) is if you manually turn down the priority level for that event from the Planner. If you choose to do this, that event can only be overbooked by a higher-priority Scheduling Link to offer up maximum availability for your most important meetings.

Will Critical (P1) Reclaim events schedule over my meetings booked via Scheduling Links?

No. Meetings booked on your calendar via your Scheduling Links will never be overbooked by any other smart events that Reclaim schedules including Habits, Tasks, Smart Meetings, or other Scheduling Link meetings – even if those have a higher-priority.

Will other attendees be notified if I change the priority of a non-Reclaim created event in Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar?

No. Changing the priority of non-Reclaim events on your calendar only applies to the availability shown in your higher priority Scheduling Links. It will not notify or affect the meeting for other attendees.

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