Background

Hi, I'm a student currently doing a summer internship and will soon enter my final year. I'm reviewing different productivity apps to see which one can help me waste less time and have more time to work on my personal projects. This is the third week, and I'll share my experience using Reclaim, a Smart AI scheduler for busy teams.

I reviewed Motion in my last blog post, so this blog post will use Motion as a reference.

Effectiveness

Positives

• Increase awareness of time spent: Similar to Motion, Reclaim lays out all tasks and timetables, providing a clear view of my daily agenda.

• Auto-scheduling with AI: When we have something to do, we click on add tasks, and it will be automatically scheduled on our timetable.

• Optional auto rescheduling: If the task is not marked as done on that day, the tasks will be scheduled again the next day so the task will not be forgotten. The difference between Reclaim and Motion is that in Motion, you have to mark the task as done as soon as it is finished, for Reclaim, you can mark them as done on the same day. (This is an optional feature, the default is to mark everything as done after it happens)

• Statistics: You can see how you are going on the statistics page, which helps you see any improvement or setbacks

Negatives

• Tasks cannot be organized into projects: Some tasks can be combined into bigger tasks, and being into the same project. However, Reclaim does not support organizing tasks into projects.

Ease of use

Positives

• Good onboarding: There is a comprehensive setup guide, it introduces all the features of the app, so you can learn how to fully use this tool. One bad thing is that the startup screens take very long to load, more than 30 seconds for me.

• Integrated with Google Calendar: Tasks scheduled will automatically show up on google calendar, they also have a google calendar plugin to quickly add tasks

Negatives

• Only available on the website: there are no mobile or desktop apps, therefore you must use the app from the website.

• Only supporting Google Calendar: Microsoft or other types of calendars are not supported, luckily I use google calendar anyways so it doesn't affect me

• Slow loading: when the website starts up, it tends to take quite some time to load, which is a mild inconvenience

Customisability

Positives

• Allow multiple schedules: we have a set of time set for work, school or personal life, so we can add tasks to their specific slot

• Comprehensive settings page: Compared to Motion, so much more things can be set, the most helpful for me is default task hours, so when I add a new task, it will be quicker as I have my usual settings in default

• Allow preferred time for habits: you can set a preferred time to complete a habit, for example, you can prefer writing your diary at 11 pm, which makes much more sense than writing a diary in the morning

Negatives

In terms of customizability, I don't really have anything to complain about.

Cost-Value Proposition

The price for Reclaim is £10 per month or £96 per year. This price is almost half of Motion. It is a fair deal if it really helps me increase my productivity. However, since I will only be using the basic functionalities of organizing tasks, but not the more business-centric ones such as meeting scheduling, it may still be a bit expensive.

The good thing is that they have a free tier, which only allows up to 2 habits, but is still fine for basic stuff. They also have an education discount which allows for half price, so that's worth checking out. They also have a discount for if you switch from other providers, which is kind of savage if you ask me.

Experience

Reclaim feels like a more polished Motion, with a cleaner interface, and some more helpful functionality, aside from that, it pretty much accomplishes the same thing.

Next week

Next week I will be trialling another productivity tool: I was going to go with GetClockwise.com since it is listed as one of the competitors of Reclaim, but I found out it is only for business Google accounts. I will go for next.focuster.com instead, and see how it helps me.