Show HN: Reclaim Tasks – automatic task scheduling on your calendar

Note: this service only works with Google Calendar and is free until January 1st, 2021.

Hello Hacker News!

A couple months ago I shared with you all our previous launch, which was all about blocking out time for routines on your calendar[1].

That got lots of folks asking about one-off tasks, so we got to work and just launched Reclaim Tasks.

The concept is pretty simple: you enter a task title, time required, and due date, and then Reclaim will go tentatively block out time to do the work in advance of the due date.

The idea is that for people with a sufficiently busy calendar and many incoming meetings, Reclaim can help defend the time to get work done while maintaining max availability. It is not meant to replace the long tail of small tasks, nor is it well suited for people who have very few meetings.

A few other interesting bits to note:

-- Tasks events will initially be "free" and only turn "busy" when you're running up against the due date.

-- Task events will auto-reschedule as your agenda changes.

-- Tasks get broken up into pieces (default 1 hour chunks) if necessary.

-- We integrate with Slack + Google Tasks, with more coming soon

-- We treat the calendar as the source of truth. Didn't do a task yesterday? No shame in that, just delete it and it'll be rescheduled in the future.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23760278

I've been using this new feature on reclaim and it's been awesome helping me reserve time to keep my commitments and not letting meetings take control over the day. I was already using the google tasks feature and now with some shorthand text I can reserve time to work on that task and it will adjust around as other meetings come in until I'm out of time.