Reclaim AI

I am a big fan of time blocking. Putting everything you want to do into your calendar. Not only your meetings, but also your habits, tasks, your deep work focus blocks, and even hobbies and family commitments because this makes it much more likely that

I actually follow through instead of procrastinating all day. And people like Cal Newport have made this technique popular. The only downside is when something in your schedule changes and it will happen, then you have to reschedule all other events and this can become very tedious and you might abandon the

technique altogether. Today I'm going to show you an AI that can manage your calendar for you. It works with Google Calendar and

Outlook. You just tell it what you want to do, what the priority of each item is, and what's your preferred time

to do this task. And then the AI will automatically find the best spot in your calendar to do this thing. And if something changes, the AI automatically reschedules this event to a better

time. You can schedule everything from tasks to habits and meetings. And then you tell it how much deep work you want to do and it will automatically fill in the available remaining time with deep work blocks. You can also schedule meetings intelligently depending on you

and your team members' availability. It's like having a personal assistant 24/7 that never sleeps and never makes mistakes. And the best thing is since this tool is made by Dropbox, it's very mature and

has all features that you would expect from a modern calendar. And it has powerful integrations for Slack, Todoist,

Jira, Linear, and more. And in this video, I will walk you through all the important features of this tool. Together, we will plan our week from scratch. Then we will add some interruptions and see how the AI handles them. and if it actually makes time blocking easier or if it's just another distraction. My name is Florian Walther and this is the AI tool corner where I review the latest AI software to find out which ones can actually improve our lives and businesses. The tool is called Reclaim AI. I will put the link into the video description below. They have a free tier where you never have to pay anything and when you sign up you also get a trial for the business features. So you can see if you need any of these additional features or if the free tier is enough. Again the link to it is in the video description below. And then let's click on get started to create our account. And here you can connect with either Google Calendar or Outlook. And you can actually connect multiple calendars later and synchronize between Outlook and Google Calendar. I'm going to pick Google calendar here. And after we signed up, we get to the onboarding process. Go ahead and click continue. And then we connect our work calendar. That's our main calendar where all the meetings and important work events go on. Select all permissions here. And we can even connect a second account to synchronize our personal calendar and our work calendar. But we will skip this here because I only have this one account. Then answer a few questions about yourself. And then we select our focus time. That's the time for deep work. I keep this as proactive. And then I set this to 30 hours because I don't have many meetings and I want to use all the remaining time to get my important work done. If you don't know what to choose here, don't worry. You can always change this later. And here we select create scheduling links to have reclaim prepare some meeting links for us. We will take a closer look at them later. You can invite team members, but I will skip this for now. And then we click on finish. And then we can see that reclaim already scheduled a habit lunch and our focus time. And all these events are also synchronized into your Google or Outlook calendar. And vice versa. So everything we put into our Google calendar will also appear in reclaim. And everything is synchronized automatically. You can keep using your Google or Outlook calendar as your daily driver and only use reclaim behind the scenes to auto schedule your habits and events. And there's even an integration for Google Calendar that puts reclaim features here into the sidebar. We will take a look at this later. One more thing, your time settings in Google Calendar. For example, the time format P.M. or 24 hours or on what day your week starts, which is somewhere down here, is also synchronized into reclaim. This is what Reclaim uses for its settings. So after refreshing the page, we actually have 24-hour format. Now because that's what we use in Google calendar. Remember in the onboarding process, we set the focus time which we can find here in this focus menu option. And here we can edit it to change how our deep work time is scheduled. Here you can adjust the total duration. We can also set our ideal focus time duration for a single day. Let's say on a perfect day I can focus for six hours. But I don't want to do deep work for more than eight hours per day. We can set this here. And we can also set a min and max duration for a single focus block. For example, it's pointless to do deep work for less than 30 minutes. But I keep the maximum as it is because I'm fine with having 8 hours in one block if there is enough space. There are some more settings we can change here. The event title for these focus blocks. What hours we want to use to schedule them. Working hours is fine. We will take a closer look at ours later. And there are some more settings. Do we want to auto decline meetings? What's the visibility for others that have access to our calendar for this focus time? We keep the defaults here. And if you want to disable this feature altogether, you can turn it off, but usually you want to keep using this. Before we start scheduling events, let's take a look into the calendar sync feature. Here we can synchronize events between our personal calendar and our work calendar which can be useful because if you put something on your personal calendar like picking up your kids, this affects the available time in your work calendar, right? And reclaim can automatically synchronize these events. So let's see how this works. First, we select our source calendar. That's typically our personal calendar. I'm going to use the same account. And in Google Calendar, you can add multiple calendars to a single account. So here I'm in my Google calendar account and I have this main calendar and this personal calendar. Those are two different calendars. Actually let me rename this to work. In reclaim we can now select our personal calendar and synchronize the events to our work calendar which is the primary one. Next here I use the same account for both calendars but you can even connect multiple different accounts and you can even synchronize between Outlook and Google calendar. Then we have some more settings like the color that's used for these events. We keep the default and the visibility of these personal events in our work calendar. How should they show up? For example, we put an event on our personal calendar that's called doctor's appointment. In our work calendar, it will just be named personal commitment so that when others have access to our calendar, they can't see the name of this event because this might be a personal. There are some other options, but the default is fine. And I also keep the defaults for these other settings. And if you want to delete a synchronization, you can do so here. And now our personal and work calendar are synchronized. And we will see how this actually works later. Let's go into our settings and take a look at the hours. You usually want to use different time blocks and even days depending on the type of event that you schedule, right? For example, meetings should happen in your working hours, but personal commitments like exercising should happen at different hours and maybe even on the weekend. You can define all of this here in the hour settings. Let's say my working hours are from Monday till Friday, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. And I can apply this to all days. My meeting hours are a little bit different. They are from 9 till 16. You can set whatever you prefer for your workday. And then we have personal hours. Personal hours are every day of the week from 8:00 in the morning till 8:00 in the evening. And I actually want to schedule these personal tasks to my personal calendar that we connected earlier. We can also set custom hours for example shallow work use for non-urgent tasks like email and admin tasks. And I want to use these hours for tasks, habits, scheduling links and smart meetings. And for the category, we keep work selected. Let's create these custom hours. And then we can define the time block for them as well. Let's say I prefer to do shallow work at the end of my workday. So the work hours are from 8 till 17. So for the custom hours I will say from 15 till 17. So the last two hours of my workday should be reserved for shallow work like answering emails. I don't want to do this at the start of my day. The changes are automatically saved up here. Our time zone is automatically read from our Google calendar. And you can even set travel time zones which is really cool. So if you know that you are in a different country between a certain start and end date, you can set additional time zones here and then the events in your calendar will automatically move to this new time zone only between the start and end date. I don't need this here, so I will skip this. And reclaim will actually also detect when you move to a different location and adjust your time zone automatically depending where you are in the world. So you might not even need this setting. Okay, now let's get to the interesting parts. Habits. In the onboarding process, we already created one habit, which is lunch. Let's take a look at this here under habits. We can edit this habit. It contains a bunch of different settings like the priority and the preferred times when we want to do this habit. But let's keep it as it is and create a new one. We can either click on new habit or use one of the predefined templates. Here we have a ton of predefined habits. And we can even create habit templates for our team. More on that later. Here I want to search for exercise so that we don't have to create this from scratch because this already contains some sensible default settings for the exercise habit. So exercising is not critical. Medium priority is fine which means that it can be overwritten and replaced by higher priority tasks and habits. We will see how exactly this works in a moment. This keeps our calendar flexible. We want to schedule exercising to our personal calendar because it's a personal task, right? category is already set. And for the hours, I want to select personal. Remember earlier we defined our hours. Personal are every day of the week between 8 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. So within these hours, we want to schedule exercising intelligently. How often do we want to do it per week? Three times a week. We can select our preferred days. Monday, Wednesday, Friday is fine. and our ideal time. Ideally, if it's possible, I want to exercise around 2 p.m. So, if this time slot is free, Reclaim will use it. If it's not free, it will use any of these other times here. And it can even move it to another day of the week if Monday, Wednesday, Friday are not free. How much time do we want to reserve for it? I can get a full workout in in 30 minutes. So, the minimum time is fine, but if more time is available, I want to go up to 90 minutes for a single workout. Then we have some more settings that define how reclaim handles this habit and how this habit shows up to other people. I actually don't want to make this public because I don't want my colleagues to know that I exercise at this time. So I select either private or the default visibility which will handle it automatically. For the time defense, we can use Reclaim's AI, which means that it will intelligently reschedule our exercise habit depending on the available time. And we don't want to auto-decline invites because exercising is not that important that we have to cancel meetings because of it. Now, there's one more really cool feature for habits. We can add a dependency. For example, we can say we always want to exercise after lunch. I don't want to exercise on an empty stomach. If you prefer to exercise before lunch, you can do that as well. And now the AI will never schedule exercise before our lunch. Looks good. Let's save this. And now reclaim automatically schedules this habit on your calendar at the perfect available time. And it even does this for a couple of weeks in advance. You can see that exercise has a dashed border and a transparent background which indicates that this event is not locked in place yet which means that it can be overwritten by other habits, tasks, and meetings. And if someone wants to schedule time with us, this time block is still shown as available to them. That's very important because we can move exercise to a different place on our calendar. And in Google calendar, this habit also shows up. It's in our personal calendar here and not in our work calendar. Here it's not dashed, but it has this little free emoji in front of it. And it's also set to free here, which is important because it makes this time slot show up as available to someone who wants to schedule time with us. More on that later. Now, at a certain point, reclaim will lock this habit in place automatically. This happens if we are very close to this event or if there's not enough space in our calendar to reschedule it. How exactly this works can be changed in your settings. You can take a closer look at it later. But we can also lock a habit in place manually. We can just right-click it and click on lock here. So now the background is opaque because reclaim won't move this event around anymore. And in our Google calendar, it now has this lock emoji in front of it. And now we have two events here. Why? Because remember we have a synchronization between our personal and our work calendar. So in our personal calendar we have exercise. But in our work calendar we have personal commitment which is also our exercise but the name is hidden so that not everyone can see what we are doing at this time. But now if someone wants to book time with us they know that this time block here is not available because we have a personal commitment at this time. If this is confusing to you, don't worry. All of this happens automatically under the hood. You don't have to worry about this too much. Another way to lock an event in place is to just move it around. So, if I drag and drop this to a different time, Reclaim knows that we want to do this at this specific time and it will also lock this in place. And not only that, it also reschedules the focus time after a few seconds because this is why we use reclaim in the first place, right? So that it can reschedule our other habits and responsibilities automatically. And all of this is synced into our Google calendar automatically. Super cool. In the past, you would have to do this manually. And that's very tedious because you had to change the time of three different events. These two focus blocks and the exercise block. Now, it happens automatically. If we change our mind, we can also unlock this event to make it available again. Now, let's say someone sends us a meeting invitation on Wednesday 2 p.m. where I usually want to exercise. You can see that reclaim did not reschedule exercise yet. But that's not a bug. This is because we haven't accepted this meeting yet. So there's no reason for the AI to reschedule our exercise if we maybe don't go. But if I click yes here and confirm this meeting, reclaim goes ahead and reschedules our exercise and the focus time and it also added this decompress time block. I will show you what this is in a moment. We can also easily reschedule habits. For example, we could say we don't have time for lunch right now, so let's snooze this for 1 hour later. Reclaim reschedules everything accordingly. Similarly, we can say actually I have time for my lunch right now. We can click on start to start it immediately. We can stop it, restart it, skip it completely. So, we have complete flexibility and reclaim will always adjust your remaining schedule automatically. There are some default settings for this which we can find in our settings under scheduling. Here you can define rules for locking events in place automatically. How events are started and scheduled. You can take a closer look at this yourself. You can even change the emojis for these events. Now let's take a look at buffers. Remember in our planner after our meeting we have this decompress event showing up here. This is because after a meeting you often need a few minutes just to get a short breather and you don't immediately want to start with your next responsibility. You can define this here in the buffer settings. The decompress time is automatically set to 15 minutes. You can change this here. And for what kind of meetings you want to use this for all meetings or only video conferences. Similarly, you can define a break time after a habit or a task. Let's try 15 minutes. And we can also set a travel time. Reclaim will detect when an event happens in a different location and automatically add a certain time in front and behind it to take travel time into account. Let's set this to 15 minutes. And even cooler, if you have to fly somewhere, Reclaim will detect this automatically depending on the location and add an even bigger travel time because flying takes longer, right? Okay, let's try this out. Let's say our meeting here is actually not a video meeting. Let's say we actually want to meet somewhere in person. I'm just going to enter a random location. Let's just pretend we have a nice cafe there and we want to meet there. I save this location. And now reclaim automatically added travel time before and after the event. Isn't this cool? Now, you can't set a location for habits, but you can still add a travel time by adding this needs travel hashtag to the title. This tells Reclaim that this habit also needs travel time, which is then automatically added to all instances of our exercise habit. There are also a bunch of other hashtags you can use to fine-tune reclaim. You can find them in the documentation which you can find here under help docs and they also have an AI chatbot that you can ask questions at any time. And this is the easiest way to learn how reclaim works. Next, let's take a look at tasks. Up here, we can create a new task. And tasks are events that you want to put into your schedule until they are completed. We give the task a name. For example, grocery shopping. And I also add that needs travel hashtag to the title. We can give it an emoji. We set the priority to high because our fridge is empty. How long does it take? Let's say 45 minutes plus travel time. If it's a longer task, we can automatically split it up, but it doesn't make sense to split up grocery shopping, right? So, we unselect this. We want to do it in our personal hours. We want to do it as soon as possible and before the 2nd January. Let's create this task and then reclaim will find the best time for it in our calendar. And because it has a high priority, it can overwrite habits and tasks with a lower priority. So, reclaim scheduled grocery shopping for today because we are free and it added some travel time. Let's create another task. This one is called organize emails. It has a low priority, but this will take quite a bit of time because our inbox is full. So, we set 8 hours for this. And because it's so long, we want to split this up into multiple tasks. The minimum duration for a task is 30 minutes. But I don't want to organize emails for more than two hours at a time. And for the hours, this time we select shallow work because this is what we created these hours for. Again, we want to do this as soon as possible. And let's say before the end of the week. Create. So now reclaim scheduled a bunch of these organized emails tasks, but at different days in our calendar because we said we want to split this up into smaller work blocks. Again, we can decide to start this task immediately if we want to do it right now. We can also send it to up next which tells reclaim that this is the next task you want to do before any other tasks and it will go ahead and reschedule everything intelligently. You can also mark a task as completed which will remove it from your schedule. You can also schedule a task for a specific time by just dragging in the calendar selecting task here and this task will automatically be locked in place for this specific time in your calendar. In your settings, you can also specify some defaults for tasks like the default duration and priority and a bunch of other settings. And as I told you in the beginning, there are also integrations for different to-do apps like Google tasks, Todoist, Linear, Jira. This will synchronize your tasks from these apps to reclaim and even the priority is automatically mapped to whatever you set it in the connected app you're using. There are also integrations for Slack and Zoom which automatically syncs your status with reclaim which is really useful. And we will take a closer look at the Google add-on later in this video. So make sure to watch this all the way to the end. You can also invite team members which makes it easier to organize tasks and meetings between you. Here under the member settings, we can invite someone. Let's try this out. You can also define team defaults. For example, the default focus time or habit templates that should be available to all your team members or the default working and meeting hours for your team members. Of course, they can customize them later, but those are suggestions. You can set your custom branding like a logo and a banner, but I'm going to skip this here. And now that we have team members, we can schedule smart meetings, which makes it easy to find the perfect time for you and your team members. So, let's create one. For example, let's say two times a week we want to do a dev sync. It's a team meeting and we want to invite our other team members and we want to find a good time slot in our meeting hours and their meeting hours. We could also schedule in our work or personal hours, but meeting hours makes sense and reclaim will then find the best spot that is available in everyone's calendar. Now, this even works if this other member is not a reclaim user. It's also fine if they just use vanilla Google calendar or outlook. Then instead of the available hours, it will take this free or busy setting of Google calendar into account. If the event is set to free, then reclaim knows that it can schedule a meeting at this time. But it works even better if everyone is a reclaim user because then we have access to their different hours. Then we define when and how often we want to do this. And again, it takes everyone's availability into account. Let's say every Tuesday and Friday for exactly 20 minutes. And ideally, we want to do this early in the day at 8:00 a.m., but 8:00 a.m. is not in our meeting hours. So, let's try 9:00 a.m. It has a high priority, but it's not critical. And again, we can add a dependency. For example, we could have a habit meeting prep that we want to do every time before we have a meeting. But we're going to skip this here. I don't want to send an email. And now every team member that was invited has this dev sync in their calendar at a time that fits for everyone. And as long as this event is not locked, it can still be rescheduled. Let's say for example on Friday next week I am out of office. And by making this an all day event, we are unavailable for this whole day. Now everything else on this day is rescheduled. Reclaim moved the exercise to the weekend because that's part of our personal hours. That's fine. Now it actually removed the dev sync completely I guess because it's not critical. Let's try changing the priority to critical and see if this behaves differently. So I changed the priority from high to critical. Hm. I would have expected this to reschedule our dev sync for Thursday because Thursday is an available day and we set this to two times a week but it didn't reschedule it. We only have one dev sync now. I don't know if this is a bug or my settings are wrong. Let's see what happens if I move out of office to a Tuesday instead. Okay, now it rescheduled the dev sync to a different day, which is what I would expect. And most importantly, the other meeting members have the same events on the same days only within their available time. So again, this is like having a personal assistant that always finds the best time for you and your team members. To schedule a meeting with someone, you can also give them one of your scheduling links. They were created in the onboarding process in the beginning. If you remember, we can also set up our own links or edit one of the existing ones. And each of them has a priority which defines what other events this is allowed to override because sometimes you have meetings that are not really that important and other meetings are extremely important. So depending on the kind of meeting, you can send a different scheduling link with different available times and different priority. This is extremely useful and each of them has their own URL name, even an icon. You can even add custom fields here. If you need certain input from the person trying to schedule time with you, you can take a look at this yourself. Let's copy one of these links and open them in another window. So, this is what other people will see when they open one of these links. This is the high priority one. So, naturally, there are more times available that people can book with you. If this would be a lower priority link, there would be fewer times available because maybe there are some other task or habit with a higher priority happening at this time. You can also create team links and round robin links where you can invite other members and people can book time with either all of you or only one. This is extremely flexible. Let's also take a look at the Google add-on that I showed you earlier. Here in the integrations, we can connect this to our Google account and this adds this item to your sidebar where you can access all the important features of reclaim again like defining habits and tasks, access to your different scheduling links and so on. This way you can use Google calendar as your main driver and only let reclaim run in the background. You also see the different hashtags you have available which I showed you earlier. You can create new tasks, habits, everything. It also works in Gmail. Here you get all your scheduling links that we set up earlier with the different priority levels so you can easily copy them into emails. There's also a Google task integration to synchronize your tasks to reclaim. And if you have a developer in your team, you can even set up webhooks to get alerts about your scheduling links and meetings in any other app. Now, before I give you my final opinion about reclaim and if you should use it, let's also take a quick look at the stats. Here you have a nice overview how much you worked, how much time you spend on habits and distractions. You also have team stats where you find insights on your whole team. Reclaim has even more features that I didn't mention here. You can always check out the help docs or the AI help bot. It's very mature. There are not really any missing features that I have noticed. The only downside is that you might get overwhelmed because it has so many features and options, but I find that I got used to it pretty quickly. Now, who should use Reclaim? If you have a very busy schedule that changes often because you have lot of meetings or you have unexpected events that pop up at random times, then reclaim is extremely useful because it automatically reschedules everything else and you don't have to worry about this or do it manually. However, if you don't have many meetings or random events and your calendar is very static and every day looks basically the same, then reclaim is overkill. then it's fine to just use vanilla Google calendar or outlook and schedule everything manually. So you should ask yourself how often does something change in my schedule. If something changes frequently then reclaim is very useful. Again the link to reclaim is in the video description below.

You can try it out completely for free. I hope you like the video. Subscribe to the channel for more AI tool reviews in the future. Then I hope I see you in the next video. Take care.