Welcome to Reclaim.ai 🙂

We are the go-to partner for busy executive assistants, personal assistants, and administrative employees tasked with the difficult responsibility to tame the chaos of coordinating a functioning workplace.

Executive assistants (EAs) are responsible for managing the schedules and communications of their executive, or a team of executives, at their company. While their duties range from fielding their inboxes, preparing documents, and setting up travel arrangements, a lot of their day-to-day activities involve prioritizing and negotiating time commitments for their executives.

Here are some of the time-consuming tasks EAs do manually:

What is Reclaim?

Reclaim is an AI calendar app that helps busy professionals automatically find the best time for their meetings, tasks, habits, and even breaks around their existing calendar events. Designed for fast-paced teams with chaotic workweeks, Reclaim gives you the power to prioritize everything you want to get done in a week flexibly in your schedule and automatically stay agile for last-minute changes.

Why is this important? Because the average pro spends 37% of their time in meetings, reschedules 4.2 meetings/week, and has to cancel 3.5 meetings/week because they just don’t have time to do it all.

But outside of meetings, managers only achieve 52.6% of planned tasks for their team every week on average. This is because the average manager spends 49.8% of their heads-down focus time on unproductive work like back-and-forth emails, reprioritizing their time, and fielding non-urgent interruptions.

You can get this time back for yourself, and help make you and your exec twice as productive every week.

You’re focused on making the impossible happen for your exec and team, and we’re here to support you. With simple automations at Reclaim, you can streamline up to 30% of your manual tasks, as well as:

These are just a few of the common ways EAs are able to improve their workweeks with Reclaim. Let’s walk through how to set you and your executives accounts so you can start getting more time back every week.

If you haven’t already, the first step is to sign up for Reclaim for both yourself and your executive as two separate user accounts under the same team. Next, we’ll show you how to set up Delegated Access so you can manage and support an unlimited number of execs through Reclaim.

Delegated Access is a collaborative feature at Reclaim that allows you to share access to your account with another Reclaim user. This feature was designed specifically for EAs who need access to their executives calendars in order to effectively manage their schedules. With Delegated Access, you’ll have the power to do everything your executive can in their account, outside of deleting their account, adding or removing new calendars, or managing API keys.

To set it up, you just need to ask your executive to take a one-time action of granting access. They simply need to:

As soon as they’ve delegated access, you’ll be able to toggle over to their account anytime by simply clicking your avatar account dropdown in the upper-right side of any Reclaim page. We’ll also display a warning at the top of the page so it’s super clear when you’re working on your execs account.

Now that your Delegated Access is set up, you can get started optimizing and managing your executives AI calendar and scheduling preferences.

We’re about to go over all the amazing smart events you’ll be able to automate through Reclaim, but before we get into that, let’s walk through some basic calendar actions you can take to control and optimize your executives schedule:

Busy leaders typically manage at least 8.6 one-on-one (1:1) meetings/week. And as these executives are juggling up to an average of 40 meetings/week, 1:1 meetings are often the easiest to bump for an urgent team meeting or customer meeting.

But reschedule one thing in a busy calendar, and you’ve got yourself a challenging game of calendar tetris to try to rearrange time for that meeting again. We know how hard this is for you to manage constantly throughout the week — it takes over 10 minutes on average to just reschedule a single meeting (back-and-forth emails, reviewing calendars, hunting down people to negotiate times).

And all of that changes for EAs at Reclaim — you can auto-schedule all of your recurring 1:1s at team meetings, and auto-reschedule around priority changes and conflicts.

With Smart Meetings, you can put all of your executive’s 1:1 meetings on auto-pilot using AI. Smart Meetings automatically find the best time for two people to meet across both of their schedules every time (recurring at any frequency).

Here are some common 1:1 meeting types you can automatically schedule for your executive:

Smart Meetings also give you the power to auto-schedule recurring team meetings as well as external group meetings at the best time across multiple attendees calendars.

This gives you the ability to keep your execs important regular meetings on track every week, without the manual legwork to ensure the time works for everyone before every event.

Here are some common team meeting types you can automatically schedule for your executive:

To get started with meeting automation for your exec, let’s start by testing out your weekly 1:1 meeting with the boss. We know it takes seeing for believing, so let’s validate the magic first with this zero-risk test.

Once your 1:1 meeting is converted to a Smart Meeting, head over to your Planner or Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar to check out the change. If your normal time is available, it should remain there, but if we already had a conflict at that time, your meeting may have already found a better time in your schedule.

Try scheduling another event over it in Google Calendar to see what happens when a conflict occurs! You can also visit the Planner to explore the customization options for managing this event, such as rescheduling (more on that in a bit), skipping, locking, joining video calls, or reviewing past and upcoming events in this sequence.

Once you’re comfortable with how your new Smart Meeting works for your 1:1 with your exec, head back over to the Detected tab of your execs Smart Meetings page to start converting the rest of their recurring meetings to the new automation.

All of their meeting guests will receive a notification that this meeting is now using AI automation at Reclaim, and it will give them the option to create a free account to set their own meeting hours and scheduling preferences.

Smart Meeting attendees do not have to be Reclaim users, and do not have to be a part of your team account at Reclaim.

Prioritizing your executives time across all of the meetings they’re requested at is one of the hardest and most strategically tricky tasks an EA has to face every week. And while some things can only be accomplished with your amazing meeting negotiation and prioritization skills, Reclaim was designed to defend meetings like you would — in order of priority. But if a lower-priority meeting keeps getting bumped week-after-week, you can trust the AI to give it a special priority boost so that person isn’t forgotten, just like you would.

So now that you have your recurring meetings set up for automation using Smart Meetings, let’s walk through how to prioritize these for optimal scheduling.

Visit your Priorities page to review and prioritize all of your Smart Meetings. While you can update the individual priority level of any individual Smart Meeting anywhere you find it, the Priorities page is the best view of all of your priorities in one place to really size up which meeting is most important compared to the next.

Reclaim offers 4 priority levels 1. Critical, 2. High, 3. Medium, and 4. Low. All Reclaim events schedule in order of priority. To see all of your Smart Meetings, expand the Smart Meetings tabs under each of these columns on your Priorities page.

You can now drag-and-drop meetings across the different priority columns, or click the 📶 icon to change a priority for that meeting (or any other smart event here). Learn more about managing priority levels for your executives Smart Meetings in this help doc.

As mentioned above, we know (and we know you know) meetings are rescheduled all the time. In fact, 42.4% of 1:1 meetings are rescheduled on average every week and 29.6% are outright canceled because there just isn’t enough time in the day. So even though your executives recurring meetings are now automatically scheduling at the best time for them and their attendees, new priorities and urgencies pop up all the time and we’ve built special controls for you to be able to both automatically and manually reschedule around.

Here are the most common causes for a meeting to be rescheduled or declined (reported as a percentage of people who were impacted in the past year):

Here’s what’s most important to know about how rescheduling works for Smart Meetings:

Visit our Smart Meetings Help Doc Collection to learn more about all the powerful automation capabilities for your recurring meetings.

Now that you have your executives recurring meetings perfectly automated, let’s talk about all of their one-time meetings that require extra special attention to get on the books.

In case you didn’t know, 47.1% of all meetings are one-time meetings. That means that almost half the time, you are negotiating back and forth with one to a group of people just to get an individual meeting scheduled. It’s also interesting to note that 27.3% of all meetings are spontaneous and unplanned, meaning they need to get set up asap no matter what is on the calendar.

We know how challenging of a task this is for EAs to try to keep up with all of their executives one-time meetings, but we’ve got your back. Reclaim has designed an AI-powered Scheduling Link that has advanced capabilities far beyond anything else that’s been seen in the market.

You’re probably familiar with Calendly links, and other meeting links that allow you to share your executives availability for meetings. While these tools are often adequate for people without much going on in their calendars, you’ve inevitably discovered they just don’t work well for getting urgent meetings booked within the next few days even to weeks.

That’s because these competitor links only show times where your exec is already free on the calendar, not where they’d be willing to move lower-priority stuff around to accommodate the meeting (this is probably where you’re doing the heavy lifting for getting these meetings booked!)

With Reclaim’s AI-powered Scheduling Links, you can share your executives maximum availability for meetings over lower-priority events they’d be willing to auto-reschedule. This even includes non-Reclaim events scheduled through their Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar.

So if an important customer has an urgent topic to discuss, you can send them a “Critical Priority” Scheduling Link, and anything that’s High Priority, Medium Priority, or Low Priority on the calendar will show as available time slots to that customer when booking. And if a lower-priority smart event is scheduled over, it would automatically reschedule just as you’d expect at the next best available time in order of it’s priority.

Additionally, you can add up to 3 different meeting length options to a single Scheduling Link to give your schedulers even more options for getting time with your executive. For example, while they may have wanted a 60-minute meeting, they’d take a 30-minute meeting time slot this week over waiting for the hour-long opening next week.

Creating Scheduling Links for your executive is extremely easy and only takes a few clicks to get these three default templates which should handle up to 90% of your meeting needs:

You can also create custom Scheduling Links, one-time Scheduling Links, and Team Scheduling Links anytime in Reclaim to handle whatever type of meeting you need to get on the books for your exec.

Reclaim also supports Round Robin Scheduling Links, and while your executive likely isn’t spending time in a customer support or sales queue, this is actually a helpful tool for recruiting when a candidate needs to get time with one of the senior leaders during the interview process.

People average 29.9% of their meeting time in external meetings, which translates to a lot of external scheduling and coordination work for you to juggle for your executive. Executives (or EAs) use Scheduling Links 8.1 times/week on average to set up many of these meetings.

So let’s walk through how to share your executives availability for their important meetings. You can grab Scheduling Links for any of the executives you support from the Teams tab which has everyones Booking Pages on your team, containing all of their public Scheduling Links.

If you are using Delegated Access or are directly signed into these of your executives non-Reclaim accounts, here are some additional places and methods for sharing their Scheduling Link for external meetings (or for sharing your own):

As you well know, there’s an art to delivering a Scheduling Link. You need to do so in a way that shows the person you’re being respectful and considerate of their time vs. trying to save some of your own.

Here are some helpful reminder tips on sharing Scheduling Links for external meetings.

External meetings aren’t the only types of one-time meetings on the calendar. Internal team meetings can be just as hard to set up as external meetings, especially if you’re coordinating across multiple busy senior team members calendars. Fortunately, you can use Scheduling Links to easily find that rare moment of mutual free time across multiple team members calendars.

Simply visit your Scheduling Links page, and create a new Team Link using the normal link creation flow. Just add additional Meetings Organizers for the team members you need for your meeting (note all of these people must be in your Reclaim team account).

Once you’ve added in the team members, you can see a heat map of everyones mutual availability right in the editor. If you’re not seeing as much free time overlap as you’d like, here are a few ways you can create more availability:

Finish up the rest of the Team Link setup, and save your link. You can now use this link to automatically pull everyone in this meeting groups availability together and easily book these one-off meetings for your exec anytime using their own Team Link. This link will also stay available to you to use for all future meeting needs with this group.

As an executive assistant, one of the most important responsibilities you hold is protecting your execs work-life balance, which means you have to be a strong defender of their personal time. And there’s no easier way to do this than Calendar Sync.

With Calendar Sync, you now have the ability to manage their personal time across just their personal calendar without having to make any manual updates on their work calendar. Unlike standard Calendar Sync features at Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar that only allow the account holder to see their synced events (but coworkers cannot see when you’re busy), Reclaim allows you to actually block availability for synced events.

You can also control for your executives how their events appear on their calendar to the rest of the team so you’re not over-sharing of under-sharing context around their commitments. Here are the 4 different visibility settings you can set for your executives Calendar Sync:

Calendar Sync is easy to set up by simply selecting your executives source calendar and destination calendar (though you may need them to connect their second calendar first to make the connection through Delegated Access).

In the Calendar Sync setup workflow, you can set which type of calendar it is, whether to sync certain types of all-day events, and if you’d like to sync events at all hours or just Working Hours.

While your executive is undoubtedly very busy with meetings every week, they’re still responsible for executing a lot of important work around those meetings.

But if you’ve ever tried time blocking heads-down time in their calendar before, you’ve likely found it more of a chore than it’s worth. That’s because normal Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar events are fixed and inflexible, jamming up their calendar and eating up the availability they need to keep open for new meeting requests.

But at Reclaim, we have two easy features you can use to defend time for your executives deliverables while still keeping their calendar flexible for last-minute meetings, priority changes, even PTO and sick days.

The easiest way to determine which feature type to use is whether the deliverable is a recurring project or a one-time task.

Habits are like smart recurring events. But instead of setting a recurring event in Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar to repeat say every Monday at 2pm, Habits allow you to set smart scheduling windows for:

What types of routines should you defend for your executive? First, you can visit the Detected tab on their Habits page to see if there are any existing repeating events you can convert to Habits to start smart scheduling them using their existing settings as the “ideal time.”

Here are the most common Habit templates used by other executives managing their time at Reclaim:

So as you already know, there are many important work routines that executives need to make time for to keep things moving for their team and plan for the future of their department or company. But it’s not just work EAs are defending time for on their executives calendars, two out of the top 5 most popular Habit templates for execs are for personal routines: lunch and exercise.

And if any of your executives Habits get scheduled over, bumped for another higher-priority event, or just can’t be met due to a personal commitment, they’ll automatically be rescheduled to the next best time. This is the perfect scheduling setup for you and your exec because it allows you to keep their schedule flexible while still helping them keep up with their long-term work and personal goals they need to chip away at continually.

While Habits are for the ongoing routines that need your attention regularly, Tasks are for all the one-time projects that you or your exec need to get done and checked off completely.

You’re likely already managing and prioritizing a task list for your executive, and this is the tool you can use to integrate that process into your calendar management activities. During your weekly sync with your executive where you walk through what’s most important to prioritize for the week, pull up your Task list in Reclaim to add anything new to their list and reprioritize anything that’s risen or fallen in the ranks.

And if you’re managing a task list in a popular project management app, you can automatically sync your tasks right to Reclaim to defend time for them in order of priority before your execs due dates. This is a major time-saver for EAs being able to bridge the two high-touch systems of project and calendar management. Here are the supported project management integrations at Reclaim:

Easily create a new Task from any page in the Reclaim app, from your project management app, or even Slack. Just like any other smart event at Reclaim, all Tasks schedule in order of priority around your executives other events. And while you can always break down big tasks into individual smaller tasks, don’t be afraid to create large tasks that require significant durations to complete. Reclaim will give you an option to split up Tasks into smaller working sessions so it more realistically fits within your execs calendar.

If your exec needs to get something done ASAP and you need to make sure it’s next on the calendar, you can move a Task up to the “Up Next” bucket from your Priorities page, Planner, or Tasks page. This will schedule it first above all else. Reclaim also offers advanced settings how to schedule your Tasks by default to check out.

If your executive is frequently on the road for meetings and events, another useful feature at Reclaim is our automatic travel time scheduling.

Whenever your exec has a meeting with a physical location set in the event details, Reclaim will automatically add a custom amount of travel time before and after the event so they have time to get where they need to be. This is a huge lifesaver for preventing back-to-back meetings that are just physically impossible due to their location.

Your executives days are likely back-to-back with meetings, focus work, and other events which can be a chaotic and overwhelming display across the calendar. An easy way you can simplify a hectic calendar into easily digestible events is through automatic color-coding at Reclaim.

You can choose whether to automatically color-code all events on your executives calendar, or only those events created by Reclaim.

Reclaim automatic color-coding works by assigning colors to all events within a category of event types so you can visually distinguish what the day will be. Here are the categories you can set:

Nobody understands managing priorities like an executive assistant. Prioritize one thing and it means everything else moves down on the list. And when it comes to time management, this makes it incredibly challenging for an EA to plan out their executives time, as executives are often responsible for the most significant priorities in a company.

But you can rest assured that every smart event you create at Reclaim will automatically schedule and reschedule around your execs most important priorities. Here are the universal priority levels you can use at Reclaim:

You can manage priorities anywhere in the app, but the best place to see a comprehensive list of all of your priorities across all event types is your executives Priorities page.

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. Scheduling Links will never reschedule automatically, unless the organizer or attendee takes action to find a new time.

You can also set priority-levels for non-Reclaim events to create more availability for your executives Scheduling Links (Habits, Tasks, and Smart Meetings will never overschedule a non-Reclaim event, even if they are a lower priority, to protect your meeting commitments).

Learn more about the different ways you can shift priorities for your executive.

Common examples of times when you’d need to shift priorities for your executive:

The amazing beauty of Reclaim is by prioritizing one thing in your execs calendar, you are not left with a domino effect of dozens of other events to reschedule. All of their smart events automatically shift to the next best time in order of priority and due date.

So as you walk through the priority list with your executive at the beginning of the week (or even the beginning of every day)

As the gatekeeper to your busy executive, you know how much they have to handle in a week. And one of your big responsibilities is helping them defend time for their most important stuff. But in order to understand how well they’re truly tracking towards their priorities, you need analytics on if their time is aligned in the right places.

With automatic Time Tracking at Reclaim, you and your exec can analyze where they spend time across meetings, tasks, habits, personal events, even work-life balance metrics all through their calendar. You can view for your executive individual through their Stats page, or for your account team as a whole through anonymous Team Stats to see how their time management trends compare against their peers.

The best way to keep up with your exec on their time allocation is to pull up their Stats in your weekly review meeting. Here are a few things you can review with your excutive:

Learn more about analyzing and interpreting Time Tracking at Reclaim.