Manual calendar management feels like playing Tetris with my time. Reclaim AI changed that by automatically protecting my focus hours and rearranging everything when life inevitably gets messy.
This AI actually gets smart scheduling right
I used to spend Sunday nights curating the perfect week, then dreading the experience knowing there would probably be some change of plans. My calendar looked perfect until Tuesday morning, when an urgent client call would destroy my carefully planned schedule. I’d then be forced to spend another hour moving everything around, only to repeat the entire process the following week.
Then I discovered Reclaim AI. This service solves the scheduling chaos problem differently than other calendar apps. While Google Calendar just sits there displaying your appointments, Reclaim actively manages your time using artificial intelligence. It learns your work patterns and automatically finds the best slots for your tasks, habits, and deep work sessions.
You get to see the advantage of Reclaim when life throws you a curveball on your schedule. Let’s say I’ve planned my whole week, then suddenly I need to handle an emergency project. With traditional calendars, I’d manually reschedule everything. But with Reclaim, the AI instantly reorganizes my entire week while maintaining my total weekly work hours.
Reclaim doesn’t just squeeze all my activities into my schedule. It analyzes my entire timeline and adjusts my focus time to the next best available slot. When time gets scarce, Reclaim automatically removes less important tasks to preserve my deep work sessions. That feature alone makes it one of my favorite ways to protect both my calendar and my productivity.
How I set up Reclaim AI for deep work analysis
My initial setup for Reclaim took me about an hour to do, but each step made sure my calendar was smarter. If you’re also interested in setting up one for yourself, here’s how I did it:
First, I connected my Google Calendar to Reclaim AI to import all my planned schedules. The process was pretty straightforward. I just went to the Calendar Sync tab in Reclaim, clicked on +Add account, then connected my Google account to share my schedule.
After importing all my schedules, I then opened the Focus tab under Time Blocking to set up my focus time preferences. I set my weekly focus goal by clicking on Edit Focus Time in the upper right of the menu, adjusting the slider to 40 hours a week for my target focus work, then setting my minimum duration to 1 hour and maximum to 3 hours for each focus session before clicking Save.
Now that I’ve set my total weekly focus time and session lengths, I moved to the Habits tab to create repeatable tasks throughout the week. This space is for activities you often do at certain times during the day, such as breakfast, lunch, dinner, reading, or watering the plants. To create a habit, I click on the + New Habit button in the upper right of the screen, then enter the habit name, priority level, color and category, days, duration, and the ideal time I want to do the habit.
Then I moved on to the Tasks tab for one-off work items. Whenever I have a specific project or an event I need to prepare for, I create a task with the estimated time needed and due date. For example, my team was booked as general technician for a wedding event to handle lights, sound system, and other technical needs. So I created the task, gave it an 8-hour work block, and set the priority to high. This allows Reclaim to adjust my less important habits to accommodate the special task.
What’s great about this is that if the event was rescheduled to be three days earlier, instead of manually doing a full reschedule, Reclaim automatically adjusts my schedule while still protecting all my focus time which I use for work.
I also experimented with Buffer time settings, though I ended up disabling them. This feature automatically inserts break periods between meetings and focus sessions to prevent back-to-back scheduling. It sounds great in theory, but I found it cluttered my calendar view with tons of small buffer blocks. I prefer seeing my raw schedule without the extra visual noise, so I turned it off.
Finally, I spent time in the Priorities page to fine-tune all my activities. This is where I get complete control over my calendar hierarchy. If I decide to change the priority of a certain item, I can easily drag and drop it to the corresponding priority block. While I could also do this by editing the habit or task individually, changing priority on this page is better when I need to adjust more than one item at once.
And that’s about it. Reclaim will automatically schedule all my deep work sessions based on my target goal, activities, and priorities. While the initial setup took me a while to complete, I now have an easy time planning for my weeks since I only need to add special tasks and maybe tweak some of my habits. Reclaim automatically schedules everything within minutes.
Discovering my optimal deep work windows
After running Reclaim AI for a while now, the analytics revealed interesting patterns about my week. While you can certainly get a lot of insights on Google Calendar, I prefer using Reclaim’s UI when it comes to presenting data. The Focus tab shows exactly how much deep work time I’m getting versus my target. Looking at my stats, I discovered I was falling just short of my focus time goal. The dashboard showed I hit 39.5 hours of focus time against my 40-hour weekly target, with the system still indicating I was “On track” with my productivity goals. What caught my attention wasn’t just missing the target by 30 minutes, but seeing how my time was actually distributed across the week.
The Stats tab became my productivity dashboard, showing detailed analytics across different time categories. The data revealed I spent 18.17 hours on other scheduled activities like habits and personal events, and had 20.5 hours of free time remaining. The time breakdown pie chart showed my focus work made up 22.5 hours, with tasks taking 10 hours and habits accounting for 8 hours.
These insights help me optimize strategically. This visual data helped me understand that while I was nearly hitting my 40-hour target, I still wasn’t accomplishing enough within those focus blocks. The rhythm and distribution looked good, but I clearly needed to increase my weekly goal.
Reclaim AI basically gave me my sanity back. No more Sunday night scheduling anxiety, no more guilt about blocking focus time, and definitely no more playing calendar Jenga every time something changes. The AI handles all the tedious stuff while I actually get to focus on work that matters. If you’re tired of your calendar controlling you instead of the other way around, this tool is something worth trying out!
