What is Reclaim AI? The auto-scheduling assistant for busy people

You open your calendar in the morning and it is already solid from 9 to 5, wall to wall with meetings other people booked. The most important thing you have to do this week, the one thing nobody put on the calendar, gets pushed to the evening or the weekend. This is the default state for almost anyone working in a meeting-heavy environment: your calendar stops reflecting what you need to do and starts reflecting where other people want you to be.

The root of the problem is that a calendar is empty space by default, and whoever gets there first takes the slot. To-do lists do not fix this, because they live in a different app and cannot compete with a meeting invite. Reclaim AI was built to close exactly that gap. It turns time for work, habits and rest into real events sitting on your calendar, each with a clear priority level, and it rearranges them when circumstances change. Let's look at how the tool works and how to use it properly with Aniday.

What is Reclaim AI?

Reclaim AI is AI-powered calendar management and optimization software built by Reclaim.ai, Inc. in Portland, Oregon. The company was founded by Henry Shapiro and Patrick Lightbody in 2019 and was acquired by Dropbox in August 2024, at which point it served more than 320,000 users across over 43,000 companies, including GitHub, Zapier and PagerDuty.

The core design philosophy behind Reclaim AI is the idea of time defense. The tool does not try to replace Google Calendar or Outlook, it runs on top of them. You declare how many focus hours you need each week, how often you want to exercise, and which tasks have to be finished by when. Reclaim AI then finds places for all of it on your calendar, marks you busy, and moves things to another slot if something more important comes along. Every event is assigned one of four priority levels, from Critical (P1) down to Low (P4), and that ordering is what decides which item gives way to which.

Put differently, Reclaim AI is closer to an assistant standing by with a pencil to redraw your schedule than it is to a conventional calendar app.

Who Reclaim AI is built for

Office workers buried in meetings

If you have four or five meetings a day, an uninterrupted block of real working time is a rare event. Reclaim AI reserves focus blocks in advance based on your weekly target and moves them automatically as your calendar shifts, instead of leaving you to police them yourself. You can also turn on automatic decline for invites that land inside those blocks.

Freelancers and consultants

This group typically juggles several clients and projects, each with its own deadline. Reclaim AI pulls tasks in from Todoist, Asana or ClickUp and schedules them so everything lands before its deadline, while scheduling links let clients pick their own time without the email ping-pong. You end up with a clear picture of whether this week genuinely has room for more work.

Students who also work

This is the group most likely to have classes, a part-time job and personal commitments stacked on top of each other. Letting AI find the slots for study sessions or workouts removes the weekly planning step, which is usually the first thing people abandon. Reclaim AI also offers 50% off for 12 months on accounts registered with a .edu email address.

Team leads and small teams

On team plans, everyone can share habit templates, set up No-Meeting Days and see each other's time off on a shared calendar. That gives the whole team visibility into everyone's schedule and makes it far easier to arrange the group meetings that actually need everyone present.

Standout features of Reclaim AI

Automatic protection for deep work

You set a target, say 15 focus hours a week, and Reclaim AI finds and holds those blocks around your existing meetings. There are two modes: proactive, which fills in all your hours from the start of the week, and reactive, which only reserves blocks when your calendar starts filling up and your target is at risk. That is a meaningful difference from creating a fixed "Focus" event yourself and then deleting it the moment a meeting collides with it.

Flexible habit scheduling

Instead of pinning your gym session to 6pm every Tuesday and then skipping it because work ran over, you tell Reclaim AI you want to train three times a week somewhere between 5pm and 8pm. The AI picks the day and time that fit your actual calendar, and moves the session if something urgent comes up. There is a template library covering common routines like lunch, end-of-day wrap-up and inbox cleanup.

Auto-scheduling for tasks from project management apps

Reclaim AI connects to Google Tasks, Todoist, Asana, ClickUp, Jira and Linear to pull your task list across. For each task you provide an estimated duration and a deadline, and the system breaks it up and distributes it across your remaining open time so it finishes on schedule. When a new meeting takes over a block you had already set aside, the unfinished work gets pushed elsewhere rather than disappearing.

Smarter meeting scheduling

For recurring meetings, Reclaim AI watches every attendee's calendar and proposes a new time when it spots a conflict, instead of leaving the group to sort it out over chat. Reclaim AI's scheduling links are also smarter than the usual kind because they understand hierarchy: on high-priority links, your less important blocks still show up as free time for the other person to book.

Automatic holds for the time you forget to plan for

Reclaim AI adds buffer time after video calls so you can reset, and it calculates and reserves travel time for off-site appointments or airport runs around flights already on your calendar. This is the time almost nobody accounts for when booking, and it is a common reason a whole day ends up running late in a chain reaction.

Benefits of using Reclaim AI

Less weekly planning overhead

Sitting down to allocate time to every task is draining work, and it is usually the first thing to get dropped halfway through. Once that part is automated, all you have to decide is what matters. Where it goes is the AI's problem.

Personal time gets equal footing with work

Because lunch, workouts and school pickup are real calendar events that show you as busy, they stop being the first thing sacrificed when the week gets heavy. That is more of a behavioral shift than a technological one, but the effect becomes obvious after a few weeks.

A calendar that repairs itself

One rescheduled meeting or one urgent request usually means rearranging the rest of the day. Reclaim AI handles that knock-on effect automatically based on the priorities you set, so you are not rebuilding your schedule from scratch every time something moves.

Better command of your own time

Weekly reports and analytics show how many hours went to meetings, to work, to habits and to personal time. Those numbers are often quite far from how it felt, and they make a solid case for turning down some of the meetings you did not need to be in.

A step-by-step guide to using Reclaim AI

Step 1: Create an account and connect your calendar

Go to https://reclaim.ai and select "Get Started Free". Sign in with your Google or Microsoft account, then grant Reclaim AI permission to read and write to your calendar. The Lite plan is free forever, so no card is needed at this stage.

Step 2: Define your working hours and personal hours

Head to Hours to set your working window, your personal window and any periods you do not want booked. This is the most important step, because every scheduling decision the AI makes later is based on what you enter here.

Step 3: Choose your habits

Open Habits and pick from the template library (lunch, workouts, inbox cleanup) or build your own. For each habit you specify frequency, duration, preferred time window and priority. Start with two or three rather than switching everything on at once.

Step 4: Set a Focus Time target

In Focus Time, set how many focus hours you want each week and choose proactive or reactive mode. If meetings frequently land on top of your focus blocks, turn on the option to automatically decline invites during them.

Step 5: Connect your task apps and import tasks

Go to Integrations to connect Todoist, Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Linear or Google Tasks. For everything that syncs across, you only need to add an estimated duration, a deadline and a priority from P1 to P4 so Reclaim AI knows what comes first and can schedule accordingly.

Step 6: Monitor and adjust in Planner

Planner is the single view that pulls together your whole calendar plus every event the AI created. You can drag and drop to adjust things manually, mark tasks complete, or use the AI Assistant chat box to request changes in plain language. At the end of the week, read the automated email report to see whether you hit your targets.

Tips for getting the best results

Do not switch everything on in week one

If you declare dozens of habits and tasks at the same time, your calendar will look so packed that you will want to uninstall the thing. The sensible approach is to start with one Focus Time target and two habits, run it for about a week, then add more.

Estimate more generously than you think you need to

Reclaim AI schedules around the numbers you give it, so if you estimate two hours for something that actually takes four, your calendar will be permanently backed up. After a few weeks, compare your estimates against the actual time analytics and recalibrate.

Use priority levels sparingly

If everything is P1, the priority system stops doing anything, because there is nothing left to give way to anything else. Reserve P1 for what truly cannot move, and be comfortable leaving most of your work at P3 so the AI has room to maneuver.

Reclaim AI pricing

Reclaim AI charges per seat in USD. The prices below are for annual billing. Monthly billing runs roughly 20% higher.

Lite plan: free forever

• One user, up to 5 AI Agents
• 2 connected calendars, 1 Calendar Sync, 1 Scheduling Link
• Auto-scheduling range limited to the coming week only
• Limited integrations: Google Tasks, Slack, Zoom, Google Meet
• Suited to anyone testing the waters or just protecting a few basic habits

Starter plan: 10 USD per user per month billed annually, 12 USD billed monthly

• Up to 10 seats, 10 AI Agents per seat
• 8-week scheduling range, 3 Calendar Syncs, 3 Scheduling Links
• Unlocks every integration: Todoist, Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Linear
• Full customization of how events display on your calendar, plus productivity analytics
• Suited to freelancers, individual professionals and small teams under 10 people

Business plan: 15 USD per user per month billed annually, 18 USD billed monthly

• Up to 100 seats, 100 AI Agents per seat, 12-week scheduling range
• Unlimited Calendar Syncs and Scheduling Links, webhook support
• Adds a shared team time-off calendar and delegated access for assistants
• Team-level productivity analytics, priority support
• Suited to departments or companies rolling this out across the board

Enterprise plan: 22 USD per user per month billed annually, contact the sales team

• For organizations above 100 people, unlimited AI Agents
• Single sign-on via SSO, automated provisioning through SCIM, Domain Capture
• Organization-wide time analytics and scheduling that follows your org chart
• Dedicated security review and onboarding support for companies

Discounts: students and educators get 50% off for 12 months; qualifying nonprofits and startups get 20% off for 3 years; anyone migrating from Clockwise, Motion or Calendly gets 20% off for the first 6 months.

Limitations of Reclaim AI

Google Calendar and Outlook only

This is the first constraint to be aware of. If you run Apple iCloud calendar or an internal calendar system, Reclaim AI is essentially of no use to you, because its entire mechanism depends on direct write access to the source calendar.

English-only interface

The dashboard, the assistant chat box and the email reports are all in English, with no Vietnamese version yet. Newcomers may need a few sessions to get comfortable with the product's own vocabulary, things like Habits, Buffer Time and Scheduling Range.

The calendar looks packed and out of your hands at first

Because everything becomes a real event, your calendar after switching Reclaim AI on will look noticeably fuller than before, even with an unchanged workload. The sense that the AI is arranging your schedule without asking also bothers some people in the first week, until they get used to overriding it manually when needed.

The free plan is fairly tightly capped

A one-week scheduling range means you cannot plan around tasks with more distant deadlines, and the single scheduling link becomes awkward if you need several appointment types. Lite works better as a trial than as a long-term setup.

Output quality depends on your input

Reclaim AI cannot infer how important a task really is or how long it will actually take. It works from the numbers and priorities you enter. Fill those in carelessly and what you get back is a calendar that looks organized but does not reflect reality.

Overall assessment

The biggest value of Reclaim AI is not that it schedules better than you do. It is that it changes your relationship with your calendar: from open space where first come is first served, to a place where your time is reserved and defended on principle. For professionals in meeting-heavy roles, freelancers spinning several projects at once, or anyone who ends every week busy but without the important work done, this is a tool that shows a fairly clear difference within the first few weeks.

Conversely, if your calendar is already light on meetings and you manage your own time well, this layer of automation may be redundant. The sensible path is to start on the free Lite plan, set one Focus Time target and a couple of habits that genuinely matter, run it for a week under real working conditions, and only then decide whether Starter is worth the upgrade.