Are you tired of feeling like you’re constantly battling the clock? Do back-to-back meetings and endless to-do lists leave you feeling overwhelmed and stressed? You're not alone. In today’s busy world, managing time and schedules can feel like a losing battle. But what if there was a way to take back control, to not just manage your time but to truly master it?
With this Reclaim AI review, you will find an intelligent scheduling tool that uses artificial intelligence to automate and optimise your time. It's more than just a calendar; it's your personal time management assistant, designed to help you navigate the complexities of a busy life with ease and efficiency. Reclaim AI isn't about adding more to your plate; it's about strategically managing what's already there so you can achieve improved time management, increased productivity, and a better work-life balance.
My Experience Using Reclaim AI
I have personally been using Reclaim AI for 15 months and have found it to be invaluable in helping me to manage my time effectively and make sure that my day is streamlined. I have used it to schedule tasks, habits, and meetings, and it has completely changed the way I approach my daily work. The focus time feature is one of the most invaluable aspects of Reclaim. I find that it has helped me to really focus on my most important work. This has allowed me to really prioritise the tasks that are most important. I am not being constantly interrupted by meetings and I am able to get much more done in my day.
What is Reclaim AI and Why Should You Care?
Reclaim AI is an AI-powered scheduling and time management tool that goes beyond the basic functionality of a standard calendar. It’s designed for individuals and teams who struggle with the daily juggling act of meetings, tasks, and personal commitments. It's an intelligent scheduling layer on top of your existing calendar, working in the background to ensure your time is spent where it matters most.
The core purpose of Reclaim AI is to help busy professionals and teams better manage their time, reduce scheduling conflicts, and reclaim those precious hours for focused work. We all know the pain of an overbooked schedule – the endless back-to-back meetings that leave you feeling drained, the difficulty in prioritising tasks and hitting deadlines, and the constant struggle to find time for deep work and personal life. Reclaim AI addresses these issues head-on.
So, why Reclaim AI? It's a solution that:
Automates the scheduling of tasks, meetings, habits, and breaks.
Uses AI to optimise your calendar and adapt to your changing needs.
Helps you achieve a better work-life balance.
Aims to be an intelligent scheduling layer on top of existing calendars that you use every day, like Google Calendar.
Reclaim AI steps in to take the burden of manual scheduling away from you, allowing you to focus on what truly matters. It’s not just about filling your calendar, it’s about optimising your time for maximum impact.
Key Features and Benefits: How Reclaim AI Transforms Your Schedule
Reclaim AI’s power lies in its core features that are designed to work together to improve how you manage your time. Let’s look into some of the key features and explore how they transform your schedule:
AI-Powered Scheduling: Reclaim AI isn’t just another calendar app; it uses AI to learn your preferences, habits, and priorities, then automatically finds the best times for your tasks, habits, and meetings. This means that the app adapts to your schedule and is not a static system. It ensures that your schedule reflects how you actually want to spend your time, not just how it's traditionally dictated.
Smart Meetings: Meetings, a necessary evil in modern work life, can often become a major time sink. Reclaim AI aims to simplify meeting scheduling and optimisation, both for individuals and teams.
Smart 1:1s allow you to easily schedule one-on-one meetings with minimal fuss.
Smart Meetings lets you find the best times for larger group meetings, taking into account everyone’s availability.
Auto-scheduling means that meetings are booked considering availability, time zones, and the priorities of all participants.
Scheduling Links allow you to create customised links, share your availability, and set meeting details including duration and priority levels, making booking time with you as easy as sharing a link and keep your calendar private.
Automated Task Management: Reclaim AI integrates your task management directly into your calendar. It allows you to set priorities and deadlines and uses these to intelligently schedule your tasks.
The tool uses priority levels to determine when to schedule tasks, ensuring that your high-priority items get the time they deserve.
If you change a task’s priority, Reclaim will automatically re-arrange it on your calendar, adapting to your shifting needs.
It's important to note that while Reclaim has a task management element, it isn't a full project management suite. It is more about getting the tasks on your calendar.
Habit Scheduling: Do you want to ensure that you go to the gym, have a lunch break or read for half an hour each day? Reclaim allows you to schedule recurring activities, ensuring you maintain a balanced routine. Reclaim AI fits habits into your calendar based on their priority, making sure important habits are not overlooked.
Defending Focus Time: Reclaim allows you to block out time for uninterrupted work by setting focus time as a recurring calendar event. You can specify the duration, frequency, and ideal hours, and also ensure that focus time is set to "most defensive", which prevents it from being overridden by meetings. This ensures you have dedicated time to concentrate on deep work.
Calendar Syncing: Reclaim AI integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar, allowing you to import meetings and events and visualise what’s ahead. You can sync multiple calendars, including both work and personal ones, into one interface for easy scheduling management. While Reclaim currently primarily integrates with Google Calendar, Outlook integration is planned, which will enable even more users to benefit from Reclaim's features.
Buffer Time: A key feature to help avoid burnout, Reclaim AI automatically schedules buffer time between meetings. This prevents back-to-back calls and allows you time to prepare for the next meeting or take a break, helping to reduce meeting fatigue and maintain focus.
Why Reclaim AI? The Benefits of AI-Driven Time Management
Using Reclaim AI is about more than just having a neatly organised calendar. It’s about reclaiming your time, your productivity, and your peace of mind. Here’s why Reclaim AI is the ideal solution:
Improved Time Management: Reclaim AI helps you reduce scheduling conflicts and optimise your daily routines. It automates the scheduling of tasks, meetings and habits, reducing the time you spend manually managing your calendar. It also provides a clear overview of all of your commitments in one place, helping you to see where your time is going and better manage your schedule.
Increased Productivity: By ensuring you focus on high-priority tasks and spend less time on scheduling, Reclaim AI helps you to boost your productivity. It provides proactive prioritisation, guiding you to tackle what truly matters, and its ability to schedule tasks according to priority means you are less likely to miss important deadlines. By freeing up the time you would usually spend on manually scheduling, you can spend more time on focused work.
Better Work-Life Balance: Reclaim AI helps you integrate personal time with work commitments. It blocks out time for personal activities, habits, and downtime, ensuring you have time to relax and recharge, and provides a view of both your personal and work calendars in one place, allowing you to see your whole life, not just your work.
Reduced Stress: Reclaim AI takes the stress out of scheduling by automating many of the tedious tasks involved in calendar management. This helps reduce the back-and-forth email chains needed to find a suitable meeting time, and it helps you to prevent meeting overload by automatically adding buffer time between your calls. This allows you to focus on what really matters and not be bogged down in admin.
Reclaim AI in Action: Real-World Use Cases
Reclaim AI is not just a theoretical tool; it’s a practical solution that can improve the daily lives of many different users. Here are a few real-world examples:
Busy Professionals: For professionals who are constantly juggling meetings and deadlines, Reclaim AI is a game-changer. It manages their demanding schedules, ensuring that they never miss a beat. It automates scheduling, allowing them to focus on the work itself, instead of getting bogged down in the logistics.
Team Leaders: For team leaders, coordinating everyone’s availability can be a real challenge. Reclaim AI helps by syncing multiple calendars and facilitating meeting booking through the use of scheduling links. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and it makes team collaboration smoother and more efficient.
Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs: Small business owners and entrepreneurs are often juggling multiple roles and projects. Reclaim AI acts as their personal assistant, managing their time, projects, and clients effectively. They are often driven, passionate and entrepreneurial, and motivated by achievement and independence. They need a tool that can help them prioritise tasks, manage their time and reduce stress, which Reclaim AI offers.
Specific Roles: Different roles within a company can all benefit from Reclaim AI. For example, sales professionals can use Reclaim to manage client meetings and follow-ups, marketing teams can schedule campaign planning and content creation, engineers can block focus time for deep work, and project managers can use Reclaim to manage deadlines and project tasks.
Reclaim AI can address the specific pain points for each of these roles, adapting to their individual needs and requirements, and making their lives easier.
How to Get Started with Reclaim AI: A Practical Guide
Ready to take the plunge and see how Reclaim AI can transform your schedule? Here’s a practical guide to getting started.
Initial Setup: The first step is to set up Reclaim AI with Google Calendar. The process is straightforward:
Connect your Google Calendar to Reclaim AI.
Sync any multiple calendars you use to the app.
Customising Settings: To get the most out of the app, tailor the settings to your needs:
Set your working hours, personal hours, and custom hours.
Define the priority levels that work for you.
Set up your focus time and habit scheduling preferences.
Managing Tasks and Habits: Adding tasks and habits is key to ensuring your schedule is optimised. Once you add these, Reclaim will automatically schedule them based on priority, ensuring nothing is overlooked.
Using Scheduling Links: Creating and using custom scheduling links makes sharing availability and managing meetings a breeze, meaning you can stop those endless email chains, and manage your availability more effectively.
Integrations: Reclaim AI integrates seamlessly with other tools, such as Slack, Zoom, and your project management apps (Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Todoist, Linear and Google Tasks) ensuring you have a streamlined workflow.
Tips and Tricks: There are a few tips to help you make the most of Reclaim:
Set your focus time to "most defensive" to ensure it is not overridden.
Use buffer time strategically between meetings to allow for preparation and a mental break.
Use priority settings to make sure the most important tasks get the focus they deserve.
Reclaim AI vs The Competition: How Does it Stack Up?
While Reclaim AI is a powerful tool, it's important to see how it compares to its alternatives. Here's a quick overview of some of the competition:
Overview of Alternatives: There are many tools that offer similar services to Reclaim, including Motion, Clockwise, Calendly, Sunsama and Todoist.
Reclaim AI's Unique Selling Points: Reclaim stands out for its AI-driven scheduling, time management features, its powerful focus time blocking, and seamless integrations with project management software.
Detailed Comparisons:
Reclaim AI vs. Motion: While both are AI-powered, Reclaim focuses more on scheduling and time management and is designed to integrate with your project management software. Motion has more of a focus on project management capabilities and positions itself as an alternative to a calendar, a planner and a project management tool.
Reclaim AI vs. Clockwise: Clockwise is strong in team calendars and “focus time” blocking. However, Reclaim’s robust task and habit scheduling and integration with project management software make it a more versatile option.
Reclaim AI vs. Calendly: Calendly is a basic meeting scheduler, whereas Reclaim AI goes beyond this to provide auto-scheduling, task-blocking, habit-scheduling, focus time and more.
Best Use Cases: If you’re looking for AI assistance to optimise your calendar and scheduling, Reclaim AI is a great tool. It is good for meeting scheduling and time-blocking, and ideal for teams with heavy meeting use. If you are a business owner or freelancer, you may want to consider a tool with greater project management capabilities such as Motion.
Reclaim Pros and Cons
As much as I am an advocate of Reclaim, it's important to look at both the pros and cons to see if it is a good fit for your needs. Here's a summary of the advantages and disadvantages I've experienced using the tool:
Pros:
Multiple Calendar Syncing: Reclaim AI syncs all of my multiple calendars into one interface. This has made it so much easier to manage my work and personal commitments.
Defended Time: The ability to distinguish between free time and defended time allows me to protect my time for important tasks and projects.
Prioritisation: Reclaim separates meetings, tasks, and habits, which makes it easier to prioritise and keep a clear overview of the day.
Buffer Time: I love the way that Reclaim automatically schedules buffer time after my meetings, which prevents back-to-back calls.
Integrations: It integrates seamlessly with a wide range of useful tools, such as Google Calendar, Zoom, and Slack.
Free Plan: There is a free basic plan, which allows new users to try out the core features of the software before committing to a paid plan.
Cons:
Google Calendar Dependency: Reclaim relies heavily on Google Calendar, which is not ideal if you use a different calendar system.
Pricey Paid Plans: The paid plans can become quite expensive for larger teams or organisations wanting premium features.
Restrictive Automation: Although you can customise the settings, having your calendar managed automatically can feel restrictive for some users.
Limited Project Management: Reclaim does not offer the same project management capabilities as some more specialised tools like Motion.
Potential Privacy Concerns: Automating your calendar may raise some privacy concerns for some users, but the settings can be adjusted to mitigate this.
Reclaim Integrations
One of the reasons that Reclaim AI has become such an essential part of my workflow is its ability to integrate with other tools I use every day. Reclaim has been designed to link up with many applications to provide a streamlined workflow.
Here are some of the integrations available:
Slack
Multiplayer
Zoom
Google Tasks
Todoist
Asana
Jira
ClickUp
Linear
Trello
monday.com (coming soon)
These integrations enhance the overall user experience, allowing for the automatic scheduling of tasks and meetings based on the tools you are already using. These integrations ensure that Reclaim fits seamlessly into your existing workflow, and this makes it so much easier to manage your time and tasks effectively.
Reclaim AI offers a range of pricing plans to suit different needs:
Reclaim Pricing Details
Reclaim offers various pricing plans to suit different needs and budgets, and after using the tool for nearly a year, I can confidently say that it is worth every penny. Let's break down the options:
The Lite Plan: This is a free plan, perfect for individuals looking to optimise their personal calendar. It includes core features like 3 habits, 2 connected calendars, and 1 scheduling link. It's an excellent way to try the software and decide if it is right for you.
The Starter Plan: This plan starts at $8 per user/month and is ideal for smaller teams. It includes unlimited calendars, habits, and smart 1:1s. It is the ideal choice for smaller teams who are just starting out using Reclaim.
The Business Plan: This plan is priced at $12 per user/month and comes with unlimited scheduling links, more integrations, priority support, and premium features like no-meeting days, and is suitable for more established teams.
The Enterprise Plan: This plan starts at $18 per user/month and adds enterprise-level support, security controls, and custom onboarding, and is perfect for larger organisations.
I was a little worried that the price might be high when I first started out using the software, but Reclaim has completely changed the way that I work. I am now so much better at defending focus time and reducing meetings, which means that I am much more productive. I have found that the time and stress it saves has easily made it worth the monthly price. Reclaim also offers discounts for start-ups, education, non-profits, and also if you are switching over from another tool, so it is worth enquiring if you are eligible for a discount.
So, is Reclaim AI worth the investment? Given the amount of time that Reclaim AI can save you by automating many of the tedious tasks associated with time management, the increased productivity it facilitates and its ability to reduce stress, many users feel that it is well worth it. The value proposition is clear: Reclaim AI is an investment in your time and your well-being. I have personally never looked back since I weaved Reclaim Ai into my daily workflow.
Addressing Potential Challenges and Concerns
Like any tool, Reclaim AI isn’t without its limitations. Let’s address some potential challenges and concerns:
Learning Curve: Reclaim AI has a lot of features and it may take time to fully understand all its functionalities. To overcome the learning curve, you can use the resources and videos that Reclaim AI provides and start by mastering the core features before exploring the advanced ones.
Mobile Limitations: Reclaim AI does not have a dedicated mobile app and instead is a mobile-friendly web application, which means there may be limitations using it on the go. A workaround for this is to ensure you have your mobile browser set up in such a way that it is as simple as possible to access your calendar and Reclaim AI.
Data Security and Privacy: Reclaim prioritises user security and uses encryption methods to keep your data confidential. It also complies with data protection regulations such as GDPR, so you can use Reclaim with confidence.
Over-reliance on Automation: While automation is a fantastic feature of Reclaim, it is important not to over-rely on it, and to still have a sense of human agency when scheduling. Remember that productivity tools are meant to enhance, not replace, human intentionality.
The Future of Reclaim AI and AI-Powered Scheduling
The world of AI-powered scheduling is constantly evolving, and Reclaim AI is at the forefront of these developments. Here are some potential future directions:
Dropbox Acquisition: The recent acquisition of Reclaim AI by Dropbox suggests that even more features and integrations may be on the horizon. This could mean even better workflow and a more efficient user experience.
Potential Future Features: The future of Reclaim AI is bright. We can expect to see new AI-driven scheduling features in the coming years, potentially including Outlook integration, and the introduction of a Reclaim Assistant to further automate your scheduling needs.
Conclusion on this Reclaim AI Review:
Reclaim AI is great at helping you master your precious time and increase your productivity. It allows you to automate and optimise your schedule, reduce stress, and achieve a better work-life balance. By using Reclaim, you can take back control of your time and focus on what truly matters.
With its AI-driven scheduling, smart meeting features, task management, habit tracking, and seamless integrations, Reclaim AI empowers you to optimise your day-to-day workflow and make the most of every moment. It addresses the "why" – why we struggle with time management, why we need help and why Reclaim AI is the best solution to this problem.
Sign up for a free trial of Reclaim AI and start your journey towards better time management, or use my affiliate link to sign up today. You can also use this link to get 20% off your first year. You can also take the quiz to find out if Reclaim AI is right for you. You may also want to check out the videos on Reclaim to see it in action.
If you like this post then please check out my post on Postplanner. The social media scheduler that will save you so much time!
Reclaim AI: Deep Dive Podcast
