
Show HN: Reclaim – an adaptive calendar app that plans time for your routines - Lightbody
https://reclaim.ai/daily-habits/
======
Lightbody
Hello Hacker News!

Even though I'm a semi-lurker, Hacker News and its community have been a
staple in my life pretty much since launch, through 3 startups and 3 kids. So
I'd love to hear what folks think of my latest creation.

Requirements to try out: Google Calendar plus ability to grant edit
permissions; optional Slack integration. We are not a chrome extension or new
calendar app, nothing to install.

My cofounder and I started Reclaim after working together as product
management leaders at New Relic for several years. While there, we experienced
what many busy middle managers feel: super impacted schedules that often
resulted in working late at night just to try to stay afloat. We decided that
if we could build a product to help better defend and focus time for these
people, we could ultimately also help capture the oft-hidden conflicts and
dependencies within organizations that are often the root cause why people,
teams, and companies burn out.

Here's how it works: in addition to helping sync your personal calendar(s) to
block out your work calendar (launched in January), we now also block out time
for important habits/routines that you want or need to do, professionally or
personally. You do this by defining a "habit" that has a title, start/end
window of time, ideal time, and min/max duration. Reclaim will then find free
time on your calendar and tentatively block out the time.

We say tentatively because if your schedule isn't too busy, we may mark the
time as "free", making you still appear available to meet with others --
something we think is really important for managers. But as your schedule
fills up, we will defend the time by marking it as busy. This is a job that is
just too tedious for a human to do, but ideal for a virtual assistant like
Reclaim. So for example, your 11am to 2pm could be wide open, but if you
suddenly get invited to several late morning and early afternoon meetings,
Reclaim would defend your lunch slot by marking it as busy and, optionally,
even declining any further incoming meetings.

I use it to block out my entire day for personal and work routines meals, time
with kids, bedtime for kids, exercise, morning and afternoon emails, morning
and afternoon coding.

The result is that my agenda looks fairly well planned out every day, but
often slightly different because of the meetings I have with people throughout
the day. And because of the flexibility and throttle of the free/busy time, I
can hand out Calendly links and feel good that I'm offering up my most
flexible availability but also that if too much comes in at once a "circuit
breaker" will flip and my day will get defended.

In terms of the tech stack, it is a React-based frontend and a Java
(Micronaut) + Postgres backend, deployed on AWS Fargate. We're getting the
most out of Postgres by using jsonb, hstore, and have even turned it into a
fairly scalable little pub/sub + job service, utilizing the listen/notify +
for update skip locked features. We deploy 10-15 times per day.

Thanks for checking it out. Feedback welcome!

~~~
poorman
This is awesome! I was just thinking that I needed to build something like
this!

I would gladly pay for this if it worked with Outlook (Office365).

~~~
Lightbody
Soon!

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artfulhippo
I may not be the target demo (I’m a solo founder) but I would never give
another company my schedule to analyze and optimize. My time is my most
valuable asset as a human and an entrepreneur, and I believe that for anyone
intent on success, time management is a function that must be internalized as
a core competency, not outsourced

~~~
Lightbody
I've had jobs ranging from solo founder (2x) to co-founder of a 4 person
startup (this one!) to SVP of Product Management of a mid-sized publicly
traded company. In all cases: you're absolutely right that managing my time
was key to my success -- and often a cause of my failures when I didn't do it.

That said: I think your framing of our product and the intent behind it is
wrong. We aren't trying to take over the job of how you strategically manage
your time. We're doing jobs that are otherwise tedious so that you get better
control of your time.

If you prefer doing the job by hand, then we're of course not the tool for
you. But I can assure you our users don't view Reclaim as some opportunity to
give up on being strategic or thoughtful with their time.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
I second this (Reclaim beta user here, and they didn't ask me to post this) -
Reclaim makes me think about my time more, but drag appointment boxes around
less.

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WalterElly
Huge fan of Reclaim! I spend a lot of time programming my calendar and always
challenge myself to be more proactive BUT my nature is to give in to reactive
work first. With Reclaim I'm able to "trick" myself by having the bot add
proactive things to my calendar that I want to do, but never get time for
(like taking a mid-day exercise break). My brain perceives this as reactive
work (i.e. I didn't schedule it, someone else did) - and as a result I'm more
likely to make the time to do the proactive work.

------
jooize
YES! I've wanted solutions related to Reclaim's concept for years! I can not
make and stick to a strict schedule of tasks at specific times. I have routine
tasks to do, that I want automatically suggested to me at opportune moments
during the day. I hope Reclaim inspires similar innovation.

As with sleep management apps, they all seem to enforce going to sleep or
waking up at specific times. I want to have it suggest when to sleep, then
detect once I am asleep, count from there, and wake me in the best phase after
the optimal length for me that day. Length determined depending on whether I
have to get up or can sleep in (use calendar).

Is there a calendar with automated suggestions and drag-and-drop preset
events? Events should have flexibility in how long they can and have to be.

Please do not require me to hand over my calendar data. Please do not silo the
calendar into an app; it should use or synchronize without issues with regular
calendar.

~~~
funcDropShadow
I've recently watched several talks of Matt Walker [1], a sleep scientiest.
And he often states that it is not only important to sleep enough, but to do
it on a regular schedule. So that the body and mind can adapt. So perhaps
there is a good reason why most sleep management want to enforce a fixed
schedule. Nevertheless, if that is not possible, it would certainly be helpful
to have such a tool you describe.

[1]:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpow...](https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpower)

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elefantastisch
I started down the path of building a simple version of this at one point. One
thing I discovered is the necessity of marking some time as busy within the
window for an event. If I have a 2 hour block free for a 1 hour lunch, someone
could still schedule a meeting which makes my lunch impossible, like a hour
meeting starting 30 minutes in. That would leave two 30 minute chunks on
either side, and I can no longer have my 1 hour lunch.

The solution is to preemptively block key times which guarantee you can still
schedule your flexible task. In this case, you need to block 30 minutes (or
whatever your smallest schedulable unit of time is) in the middle of the 2
hour window, either right before or right after the midpoint. This will leave
the maximal amount of schedulable time while still guaranteeing no single
event can wreck your lunch.

Just an observation in case it's useful to the founders here.

~~~
Lightbody
TOTALLY!

Yeah, there are a lot of little tricks we do (and many more we still need to)
to help defend the time. Part of the solution also involves asking the user
how "aggressive" they want us to defend the time.

Sounds like you've got very relevant experience here. We're hiring btw ;)

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satvikpendem
I saw this a few days ago, cool product. I'm making something similar (details
in my profile, don't want to shill my own product on a Show HN out of respect)
which deals less with automatic suggestions but more making it much easier to
schedule tasks yourself. This includes things like sub tasks and other
features. I'm also making it open source for people who want to self host it.

For this, is there are reason that there are two landing pages?

[https://reclaim.ai/daily-habits/](https://reclaim.ai/daily-habits/)

[https://reclaim.ai/](https://reclaim.ai/)

They seem similar but have different parts.

~~~
Lightbody
Yes what we're showing off today is the flexible Habits, but we have some
other features (like calendar sync, and some upcoming stuff, including -- full
disclosure -- tasks). So that's why the website is laid out the way it is.

~~~
satvikpendem
Nice, good luck! There can never be enough todo list apps on the market haha.
Hopefully it goes well, maybe we can chat and learn business tips from each
other as well.

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LeonidBugaev
I'm very busy, and it is hard to find slot in my calendar for deep work, if I
do not put it manually in advance. I was using similar concept by manually
reserving 2h slot windows each day for a deep work. And it worked great! But I
want more distinct habits like this, with more flexibility, like you have with
"defensive" settings. Really cool stuff, can't wait to try it out!

~~~
Lightbody
Thanks! We also have Tasks in beta if you want to check that out. You can
probably guess how it works :)

------
plasma
Nice concept!

A suggestion as a potential user:

I work across time zones, sometimes I’m overcommitted (eg early rise for a
meeting and one at end of day).

In that example I’d think when that happens you could flag I should end the
following day early (and block it out) to make up for lost personal time. Keep
a balance in case I delete the entry because I need to stick around at work.

~~~
Lightbody
I like it. That's exactly the kind of thing we'd love to add down the road.

------
dsp_person
Interested to try this! Previously I subscribed to SkedPal
([https://www.skedpal.com/](https://www.skedpal.com/)) for awhile but thought
it was too expensive to stick with it.

------
afarrell
Since habits and time planning are very particular to people's personal
preferences...

is there any chance that this will later have the ability to configure things
with some javascript or lua or python that I've copy-pasted from
StackOverflow?

~~~
Lightbody
We'll have an API available soon. We're actually doing some prototypes right
now using [https://pipedream.com/](https://pipedream.com/), which I fully
recommend as a nice "glue layer" for stuff like this that is simpler than
Lambda but gives you a bit more control than, say, Zapier.

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compscistd
Reminds me of a more work-calendar integrated Timeful (which was purchased and
killed by Google). I mourn it a lot since I never found a 1-to-1 replacement,
so I'm rooting for your team!

~~~
Lightbody
Thanks. We loved Timeful and it was definitely part of our inspiration!

------
jcwayne
I'd love to see todoist integration. The "find me 4 hours to do this" feature
looks like a natural fit for this. Also, any plans for a public API?

~~~
Lightbody
You should request access to our Tasks beta. You'd be pleasantly surprised :)

------
underyx
What's the key difference compared to using the native Goals feature of Google
Calendar and making the free/busy status from those events be visible to
coworkers?

~~~
Flimm
Goals in Google Calendar can only be created from Android or iOS, and not from
the web, for some reason. I presume Reclaim doesn't have this limitation.

~~~
Lightbody
Correct.

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mateioprea
Hi,

It didn't worked for me. I've signed up, i have the events created by Reclaim
in my calendar, but if I invite myself from another account, nothing happens.

~~~
Lightbody
Hmm... not sure what you’re getting at re: “invite myself from another account
nothing happens”.

Do you mean the habit event isn’t moving when an incoming invite comes in?

If so: right now we don’t move things unless we see an RSVP of Yes/Maybe. Give
that a try? You should see things shuffle after 10-15 seconds.

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tow21
I love it. At least, the idea, without having tried it yet. The moment you
support Office365 calendars, you can have all my money.

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unstatusthequo
In can’t tell if it has Exchange support. I assume not. To get into many of
the Fortune 500, you’ll need O365 and Exchange.

~~~
Lightbody
We don't support Exchange or Office 365 yet, but we plan to.

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llampx
Looking forward to having this in Outlook 365!

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TrinaryWorksToo
I've been thinking about trying to build something like this! This looks so
helpful!

