Reclaim AI Review Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

If you're a part of a larger team and you're constantly being pulled into meetings, and you've had just about enough of never having focus time for work done or even getting your lunch break, Reclaim could help.

Reclaim is in a bit of a weird software category, as it's not a daily planner, nor a project manager, nor a full calendar. It's a tool you use to create rules on how you want events and tasks to show up on your calendar.

In this article, you will learn who Reclaim is for and how it can help boost productivity by:

• Protecting your time if you're often overloaded with meetings
• Scheduling smart meetings with internal team members
• Creating flexible habits

What is Reclaim AI?

Reclaim is in a bit of a non-standard category. It's sort of a scheduler and basic task manager with a "sprinkle of AI"—the best way to describe them is as an intelligent scheduling layer atop your calendar. Reclaim is not trying to replace your calendar, or project management tool, or even personal task manager.

Reclaim is an additional tool that's sole purpose is to defend your time from others on your team, in an attempt to give you more time for habits and focus time.

Despite what you might read online, Reclaim isn't a task manager tool like Motion. When comparing Reclaim vs Motion, you'll that find Motion is a full replacement for your calendar and full task manage, while Reclaim is a tool that can help put tasks on your Google Calendar (which you interface with most of the time). You can use Reclaim to "power" your calendar to set up things like flexible habits (e.g. 30 minute lunch, 4-hours of focus time), schedule buffer time between meetings, or quickly set up meetings with internal team members.

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Who Should Use Reclaim AI?

Consider using Reclaim if:

• You're a part of a larger team who has meetings often and you want an automatic meeting scheduler that will find the best time to meet with your team members. It's important to know that Reclaim can only optimize the best time for internal meetings. If you do a lot of external meetings (like us), Reclaim won't be of much help.

• You get pulled into meetings often and want to defend your time to get more focus time for work (e.g. engineers and product team members).
• You want to automatically schedule habits like lunch, exercise, or focus time.

As a heads up, Reclaim AI currently only works with Google Calendar. It sounds like Outlook will be released soon, but Apple Calendar folks, you're out of luck (try one of these daily planning tools instead).

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Reclaim AI Key Features

Reclaim's main focus is trying to help you fit in the the things that you want to do from day-to-day, whether that be tasks, smart internal 1-on-1 meetings, or even habits.

Smart 1:1's (Soon Smart Meetings)

The feature that Reclaim is most known for is their Smart 1:1s. Say you're a manager and have dozens of 1:1 meetings each month, Reclaim will automatically find the best time for you to meet together.

Soon they are expanding this feature to smart meetings, which will do the same but with larger groups — and this is where Reclaim is similar to Clockwise which is who we see as it's main competitor.

That being said, only larger teams that have many internal meetings will get the most of this feature. For smaller teams (like ours), Reclaim doesn't make sense as the meetings we have are typically external or asynchronous.

Meeting Scheduling Links

Reclaim allows for super basic calendar scheduling (externally and with team members), similar to that of Calendly and Motion although it lacks in some scheduler features, like the ability to ask questions to the person you're meeting with prior to them scheduling.

Like with other tools, you can add buffer time between meetings so you're not squeezed back-to-back.

Habits

Habits is another big feature in Reclaim (aka flexible recurring tasks). If you're someone at a corporate job who misses lunch often, or doesn't have time for focus work, you can add a habit in Reclaim to tell your team you're busy during that time.

I think we all know someone who works through their lunch break, so do them a favor and send them this review! 👋

Tasks

Project Management Integrations

Reclaim has gone the path of "we aren't going to be a full project manager, we'll just have a basic integration with your existing project management tool".

You can integrate your project management app (Asana, ClickUp, Linear, Jira) so that tasks are pulled over to Reclaim. If you have a priority for the task in the project management software, it will import that over so Reclaim can know in which order to schedule your tasks to your calendar.

That said, don't expect task dependencies or the ability to collaborate with team members whatsoever in Reclaim. It's simply a tool created to defend your time so that team members see you're busy.

Individual Tasks

You can also manually add individual tasks to Reclaim, although don't expect it to be as robust as a daily planner or project management tools.

You can add basic tasks, set a deadline and priority and Reclaim will auto-schedule them to your Google Calendar in time blocks. If you swap out the priority (e.g. from low to high), Reclaim will automatically re-arrange the task on your calendar.

That said, when we used their AI smart scheduling, it felt very barebones compared to Motion which is what we use daily. If you're going over from Motion, expect a bit of a cumbersome experience, and don't expect it to re-schedule tasks you don't finish them in real-time. While Reclaim has a notes section for tasks, you won't get sub-tasks, the ability to create bullet points, or categorize tasks. Further, with Reclaim, you don't have an app so you can quickly add tasks on the go. Most folks integrate Todoist or project management tool when using Reclaim.

🔥 Tip: If you do try Reclaim for auto-scheduling of tasks, we recommend changing the settings in Reclaim so that tasks that you don't mark as complete are automatically re-scheduled the next day (otherwise you'll need to click re-schedule which is a bit redundant).

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Reporting

They also give reporting stats on how your time has been spent between work and personal. A feature that seems cool on the surface, but in actually reporting in on a weekly basis to check it out, it doesn't really allow you to take anything meaningful from it:

Reclaim AI Competition

We used Reclaim for nearly a year, evaluating it alongside Motion for our team. Reclaim is trying to be a smart layer atop your calendar, whereas with Motion, you no longer need to visit Google Calendar (although mind you, both of these tools require Google or Microsoft as your calendar's foundation).

The strange thing here is that while we feel like many people are talking about Motion vs Reclaim, Reclaim feels to be more of a competitor to that of something like Clockwise than it is to Motion directly.

This is because Reclaim is in no way a proper individual or team project manager. Even their task management capabilities are incredibly basic. There's no organization/categorization, subtasks, or recurrence functionality.

This is where they've chosen the integration path with other Project Managers on the market versus attempting to build it themselves (unlike Motion for example).

Reclaim also doesn't quite fit into the daily planning category either, especially when compared to Sunsama, or Akiflow.

Just to paint the picture, daily planning tools come with full calendar capabilities and a mobile app so you can add tasks on the go. Reclaim doesn't have either, it's more something you use to set up rules on how your calendar is managed. That's why it's even a bit odd that Reclaim is going down the auto-scheduling tasks path in the first place.

Final Verdict: Is Reclaim AI Worth It?

We find Reclaim interesting in what they are trying to accomplish top-level, but we find that they go too broad and shallow in terms of feature depth.

What do we mean? Well, using Reclaim as your scheduler has a lot to be desired—you can't even add basic questions for someone to answer upon filling out the booking link.

They have a basic auto-scheduling of tasks so you can manage tasks on your calendar, yet you can't add an event to your calendar (therefore requiring you to open up Google Calendar—another tool 😅 Seeing a calendar and not being able to add a quick event is jarring). You can add habits, although this isn't a unique feature as it's simply a recurring task in other tools. You also still need to use a project management tool with Reclaim, it doesn't replace anything you'd currently be using.

Reclaim fits a very specific person — someone working a corporate job, among a larger team, who wants to defend more of their time and wants a faster way to set up meetings internally. If this is you, try the free tier of Reclaim and set up a daily lunch break and another habit, perhaps some buffer time, and see if it helps get more work life balance.

If you are a business owner, soloprenuer, or team looking for meaningful way to manage and collaborate on tasks and projects, that's where time and time again, we'll recommend Motion. If you're interested in all the time blocking features, but want actually meaningful task/project management capabilities, Motion is your best bet. Read our full Motion review here.

If you are looking for a tool that can help you manage your to-dos from different software (project management app, Slack, email, etc) then we'd recommend checking out a daily planner instead, like Sunsama or Akiflow, as they give you full calendar capabilities so you don't need to use Google Calendar any longer.

If you fit into the category above, then try Reclaim for free.