The Reclaim Team is excited to announce the release of our first product: LifeWork. Start syncing your calendars now, and give us feedback at our listing on ProductHunt!

LifeWork is a handy, free utility that automatically blocks time on your work calendar for your personal events. It prevents you from having to juggle multiple calendars, missing out on life because of dumb scheduling snafus, and keeps you up-to-date on all things work-life balance.

This is just the beginning of our journey to making your calendar more defensible, more automated, and easier to manage.

So why did we start here?

It’s 3:45pm and you’re at work, in a meeting as usual. You look at your work calendar -- your guidepost for where to go next -- and you see your last meeting of the day, booked at 4pm. Almost home free. 3:50pm rolls around, and your current meeting ends on time.

At that exact moment, you get a notification from your personal calendar: you have a doctor’s appointment at 4pm.

Panic sets in. What do you do now? Embarrassingly admit to your coworkers that you completely forgot about an appointment and try to somehow make it to your doctor’s office in the next ten -- make that nine, now -- minutes?

Or do you try to reschedule the appointment, eat whatever the late cancellation fee is, and prioritize the work meeting? How does one even reschedule a doctor’s appointment these days? Email? Call them? Call them? Like on a phone?

This problem is a perfect example of how little issues in the productivity tools we use daily at work can blossom into much larger pain. When a scheduling snafu like this occurs, it’s forcing us to make a decision between work (the thing that pays for our lives) and life (the thing we don’t get a second chance at). The other day, we heard someone tell us a story about how they missed their nephew’s soccer game due to a work commitment being scheduled over it. “I felt so bad about it for days,” they said, “I just felt stupid and mad at myself.”

The funny thing is that people who run into this problem aren’t stupid. They’re using the calendar in the way it was intended.

Work stuff goes on the work calendar, personal stuff goes on the personal calendar, and so it goes. The problem isn’t them, it’s their calendars. Simply put: because the work calendar has no awareness of your personal commitments, it’s too easy for coworkers to schedule time over your appointments and errands and other life events.

Even if you’ve added your personal calendar to your work calendar, it doesn’t change how others see your work schedule -- they can’t see the personal events you see. And sure, you could share your personal calendar as a team calendar, but then people still have to add it to their calendars in order to see your available times. It’s a mess. The best solution people have come up with is to manually create events on their work calendar (or invite their work calendar to events from their personal email) which is both onerous and potentially infringing on their privacy.

This is why we’ve built LifeWork.

LifeWork is a really simple, secure, and automated way to make sure your personal and work calendars stay in sync. It takes less than a couple minutes to set up, requires no ongoing maintenance or management, and it’s free.

Here's a peek at what LifeWork does:

• 🤹‍♀️No More Jugglin’: LifeWork keeps your work calendar defended and up-to-date for everything on your personal calendar, and even shares your personal calendar with your work calendar automatically so you can manage all your events in one place
• 🔒It’s Personal: Events are copied over without your details on full display, keeping your personal life private while enabling your colleagues to see when you’re available;
• 🌈Taste the Rainbow: Sweet color-coding and Emojification makes it easy to distinguish personal events from work ones on your calendar;
• 🆓Stay Available: Until you’ve accepted an invite from your personal calendar, the synced event on your work calendar is marked as Free, meaning others can book over it. Once you’ve accepted the event, it automatically changes the synced copy to Busy;
• ⚖️Keep it Balanced: LifeWork gathers stats about vacation time, personal time, free time, and meetings to ensure you’re keeping your work-life balance in check;
• 💬Stay Updated: With our Slack integration, you’ll never miss a personal event again. Get updates when personal events change, RSVP to events, and view your work-life stats -- all via Slack.

Solving this problem was the result of months of research and product design and development, and we’re really excited to share it with you. If we can save someone from even one story about having to miss out on life because of their calendars, it’s worth all the time we spent on it.

Get started with LifeWork now. You'll wonder how you got by before without it.

And, for a limited time, we're giving away 100 digital copies of Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson's book, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. All you have to do is refer a colleague to LifeWork, have them sign up to defend their calendars, and we'll send you an email with a link to your copy!

Happy syncing!