I’m excited to share that Reclaim.ai has been acquired by Dropbox, and our team will be joining to help drive the future of productivity for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
As part of the Dropbox team, we’re going to continue investing in the Reclaim you know and love. Expect to continue seeing new features and updates that further enhance the product experience, with no planned changes to pricing or customer support anytime soon.
The biggest difference you’ll see? We now have even more resources and expertise at our side to help make Reclaim yet more powerful, and to continue making your workweek better.
How we got here
We didn’t start Reclaim with the goal of just building a better calendar. We started by asking this question: “Why is it so hard for teams to get the important work done — and why does it only get harder as the organization grows?”
As we talked to our earliest users and iterated on this question, we came to the conclusion that the opportunity here was to help people to get more intentional and intelligent about where they spent their time. Our goal became to take the only tool that we have to manage that resource — the calendar — and make it smarter.
We envisioned a world where the calendar was aware of our needs and priorities, where it was deeply integrated into the systems of record that describe what’s important, and where it could take action on our behalf to adapt to ever-changing conditions on the ground.
And it turns out that we weren’t the first ones to envision this future. Drew Houston, Dropbox’s CEO, wrote about an eerily similar reality in a letter from March 2018:
Imagine getting to work in the morning to find your calendar reorganized so you have a three-hour block of time to actually focus. Imagine starting your day and seeing the perfect to-do list—one based on a deep understanding of your priorities and your team’s priorities.
Fast-forwarding to today, we’re joining forces on this mission to explore and test new ways we can use AI to improve the way we work. As fellow travelers along this journey, it makes a ton of sense for our customers and users to continue our work within Dropbox and bring this vision to life together.
It all starts with the calendar…
There is no shortage of systems that organizations have to capture their work and describe what’s important. But they all suffer from the same disease: they’re fragmented, incomplete, misaligned, and devoid of action.
If you look at a company’s CRM, you’ll get a fairly good sense of which customers and deals matter. If you look at an engineering team’s project management tool, you’ll get a sense of which product initiatives are most important. And in theory, if you look at the OKR system, you may see the combined truth of what the company is aspiring to achieve.
But the calendar is where the rubber meets the road. It’s where all of these priorities converge, it’s where resources – people, time, and effort – actually get allocated, and it’s where dependencies across teams and departments attempt to merge. It’s where, for better or worse, teams will end up spending most of their working hours.
Put another way: if you really want to understand what someone is focused on, their calendar often tells a more truthful story than any other system of record will. Their priorities aren’t just what’s been captured in a project management system; it’s a reflection of their schedule.
We started Reclaim by focusing on the calendar because we believed – and still do – that it’s perhaps the most critical system that individuals, teams, and companies have for both understanding what’s being worked on, and for taking action. We also believe that it only gets better with increased intelligence, automation, and humanity.
…but the calendar isn’t where it ends
We also believe that the calendar is only one part of the puzzle when it comes to aligning time and priorities. While your schedule is a great way to answer the question of “what am I doing in the next few days or weeks?”, it doesn’t necessarily answer the question of “is this aligned to the most important priorities over the next few months and years?”
We believe that there is a future where the calendar connects to you and your team’s most important priorities, and where action can be taken on those priorities from the bottom-up or the top down. It’s a future where what I’m doing right now seamlessly lines up with what matters in the long run — and vice-versa.
This is a future we’ve already been building towards in Reclaim for many years, but the emergence of AI and intelligent LLMs has only made it more possible.
Currently, Reclaim gives you many knobs and dials for fine-tuning your schedule. You can prioritize your entire calendar, set preferences for when and how you want things scheduled, and provide both general and in-the-moment guidance on how you want Reclaim to flex or adapt as things change.
But that’s a model that always requires the driver to be in the seat at one level or another. What excites us is what this starts to look like when Reclaim is coupled with an advanced AI layer.
Imagine waking up to a schedule that has standing instructions for how your week should be prioritized. Reclaim is connected not only to your calendar, but to all the systems you use to capture your most important priorities and work, and is pattern-matching that against where you want to spend time.
And then, after receiving new guidance from your manager or a colleague about an urgent need, you’re able to provide instructions about what you need and what action you want to take. You don’t need to think about the downstream impact of that change, you don’t need to figure out the math of how to make time for it, and you don’t need to tweak a dozen variables to make it so. You just say it in your own words, and it happens.
Then lastly, imagine that change in direction, that small shift in effort, gets linked back to the systems where your projects and priorities live. This is a system where every ripple is felt, and where time and effort are constantly adapting and tuning themselves. And it should all happen as a byproduct of us just getting our work done.
What to expect now
We’re going to continue focusing on building towards the Reclaim roadmap. Our key priorities over the next few months include launching Outlook support for all our users, migrating users to the new Smart Meetings and Habits 2.0 platform, and building towards the release of Reclaim Assistant and smart scheduling for one-off meetings.
Our whole team is excited to get to work on this next chapter, and we hope you’re excited to be a part of it with us. If you already love Reclaim, you’re going to love it even more in the coming days, months, and years.
We're tremendously proud of our team for the relentless work and care they’ve put in to build Reclaim into the product that it is. In the beginning, Reclaim was just the seed of an idea with a few dozen beta testers. Today, Reclaim is deployed across over 43,000 companies and used by more than 320,000 people across the globe.
But most of all, we’re grateful for you. Some of you may be new to Reclaim, and some of you have been using it for years – and no matter how long you’ve been with us, your feedback and support have helped us immensely to build a better product. We can never thank you enough for the trust and investment you’ve placed in us.
We’re here to answer questions you may have. Check out this FAQ to learn more – and as always, if you want to chat, drop us a note at [emailprotected].
Thank you,
Henry and Patrick
