Start by checking where your time actually went
The first time I opened Reclaim’s Planner view on a Monday morning, I thought something was broken. My week looked… empty. Like, suspiciously peaceful. But I knew from experience that by Thursday I would be wondering which part of my calendar exploded and why I was in three Zoom calls at once 🤦♂️.
Turns out Reclaim’s Smart Calendar doesn’t just show you what’s booked — it shows what you *wish* was booked, based on your habits, routines, and tasks. So if your calendar feels strangely blank, don’t panic. You probably haven’t connected all your inputs yet.
Here’s what to check:
– Are your synced calendars actually selected in “Settings” → “Calendars”? If not, your real-life meetings might not be showing at all.
– Did you connect task sources like Todoist or Google Tasks? Without that, it won’t know what to plan around.
– Did you add any habits? That’s where lunch, admin buffer time, or walks come from. Without habits, your calendar won’t tell you when you go off-course — because there’s no course.
The mistake I made early on was assuming Reclaim was like Notion or Todoist: something you sit down and look *into*. But it’s more like an overlay on top of your week — it’s trying to predict how you’ll behave, and adjust your time accordingly.
Once all my inputs were live, the fog lifted. It got weirdly accurate. If I skipped journaling two days in a row, it warned me. If a client meeting squashed my deep work time, it silently postponed those blocks to Friday (and I didn’t even notice until the green bar moved). Handy. Like spooky-handy.
Use metrics to measure how derailed you got
I used to go by gut feel — like, “This week was chaos” or “I barely got anything done.” But Reclaim actually gives you a breakdown under the Analytics page. It’s not buried — just hit the sidebar and scroll to Weekly Stats.
Here’s what I found helpful (and sometimes kind of embarrassing):
– **Habits completion rate**: I thought I was doing daily reviews every work day. The percentage said I skipped three times last week. 😬
– **Meeting hours vs focus time**: I always *said* I needed more deep work. Turns out I was stuck in meetings for literally triple the amount of my deep work blocks. That’s not a time management issue — that’s a politics problem.
– **Time reclaimed by autoscheduling**: Not huge at first, but once I leaned into flexible events, Reclaim started protecting time that would’ve disappeared otherwise. Like a recurring buffer block at 3pm to think or reset. That’s hard to quantify, but after a few weeks, the weekly graph said I’d recovered about five hours of semi-usable focus time.
You don’t need to export anything or make pivot tables. Just hover over the bar graphs and it explains what each color means. Blue is scheduled meetings. Green is time you protected (or Reclaim protected for you). Gray is time that looked free but actually wasn’t — a subtle distinction that took me a while to notice.
Add priorities to see which tasks are doing damage
If every week feels like a blur, it’s probably not the meetings — it’s the low-priority junk that took over. That sneaky “reply to FAQ doc” thing that ate 40 minutes you didn’t track.
You can flag this with Reclaim by assigning priority levels to tasks. When I started, I just dumped my Todoist list into Reclaim and let it pick. Big mistake 🙄. Everything showed up as vaguely important, and the calendar got weirdly clogged.
Here’s how I fixed it:
– I set high-impact things like writing, design, or deep client work to “High Priority.”
– Admin, feedback, or slack replies went to Medium or Low.
– Anything like “water plants” or “review Google Form submissions” stayed outside Reclaim completely.
Once priorities are in play, the Planner starts making *actual decisions*. It’ll schedule High first, then see if there’s enough time for the rest. That alone gave me a realistic view of my week. If a Medium task vanished, it didn’t mean I forgot — Reclaim literally couldn’t find space unless I bumped it up.
Also, that helped me stop overcommitting. Before, I’d feel guilty that 10 things didn’t get done. Now I could laugh and say, “Nope, you had zero chance, inbox-zero task, you never even made it to the bench.” 🤷
Watch how meetings destroy your flexibility
This one hurt to look at directly. The heat map in Reclaim shows how your week’s flexibility changes over time — and when meetings are too rigid, your task blocks start to vanish. Yesterday you had four focus blocks. Then someone dropped a 90-minute sync at 10am Wednesday, and boom: everything after that collapsed.
You’ll notice this if you:
– Have not marked your meetings as flexible
– Or, forgot to let Reclaim rearrange low-priority tasks
The solution? Make meetings honest. When I realized my regular 1-on-1s with the team didn’t really *need* to be hard-coded at the same time, I turned them into Smart Meetings in Google Calendar using Reclaim. You just click it and drag the time range — Reclaim finds a spot, even shuffling things if needed.
Total game-changer. Suddenly Tuesday mornings weren’t black holes anymore. Focus blocks re-emerged. Even lunch became reclaimable (pun intended).
Use weekly reports to course-correct faster
Every Monday at around 7:15am, Reclaim drops this weird little gift into my inbox. It looks like a robot dev log at first — time spent, meeting analysis, reclaim impact.
But once I started *reading* it, I realized… this was exactly the type of report I used to try building manually in Coda or Notion. Except now it was done for me, and it wasn’t lying. It knew.
It told me:
– “You scheduled 9 habits, but completed 4.” Ouch.
– “15 hours were crushed by meetings.” Sounds about right.
– “3 hours of flexible tasks weren’t scheduled.” Which is weird, since I thought they were. Cue investigation.
Turns out I had forgotten to reassign a few tasks from last week — so they were technically overdue, but not reschedulable. Once I marked them as flexible + medium priority, they flowed into the next open window on their own.
That email digest becomes almost like a coach. It’s not scolding you — it’s showing you where your systems cracked. Little things like that beat any dashboard overload in Notion.
Check if your events are getting blocked by calendar syncs
This one took me way too long to notice. Smart Scheduling only works if Reclaim knows *everything* happening in your week — and that means your “real” calendar (or calendars) must be fully synced.
What I missed: I had multiple Google accounts. My main work calendar wasn’t actually the one I connected first. So Reclaim was staring into a blank alternate universe where my week was perversely open. Of course it thought I had 7 hours of focus time every day 🤦.
To fix this:
– Go into Reclaim Settings → Calendars
– Make sure the calendar you *actually use* is set as your primary
– Use the “Triaged Events” view to catch anything marked as conflicts
You can also make certain calendars read-only. I do this with my team’s core calendar — so I don’t auto-schedule things over their events while defending my own. That little mutual respect trick saved me so many awkward “hey sorry to reschedule again” Slack messages.
Create a simple color code you can understand at a glance
If you never look at your calendar layout and just feel… visual dread, it might be because everything’s the same color. Or worse, completely random colors from synced sources.
Here’s what worked for me:
– Green = deep work / high-focus blocks (e.g. content writing, audits, Python experiments)
– Blue = meetings (standups, client calls, office hours)
– Yellow = admin and shallow tasks (email, Slack, finance, ops)
– Red = habits I actively need to protect (lunch, exercise, journaling)
You can set these manually in Reclaim by editing the habit or task settings. Use the same color names across systems if you’re syncing with Google Calendar.
Now when I glance at the week, I don’t even need to think — I can tell when it’s all blue (uh-oh), a mix of green and blue (solid), or yellow bleeding into everything (admin wormhole alert 🐛).
Fix that one forgotten setting that broke everything
You know how sometimes you read every doc, follow every FAQ, and *still* the Smart Calendar behaves like a cat knocking items off your time shelf?
Okay. So I had a streak of Reclaim not rescheduling my postponed writing blocks. It just… stopped trying. Like it gave up on me. I triple-checked my task priorities, turned the sync off and on, and even rebuilt the habits from scratch. Nothing.
Then I finally found it: “Auto-Reschedule Past Tasks” in the account Preferences.
It was off. No warning. Just silently ignored anything that had slipped into the past. Once I toggled it on, boom — within 10 minutes, those blocks slithered back into open time slots like they had never left.
So yeah, if you’re banging your head wondering why nothing gets pushed forward automatically, check this setting. It’s buried — but worth it.