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Reclaim.ai Blog

Productivity tips, calendar hacks, & product updates from the Reclaim team.

How good is your work-life balance?
February 7, 2020

We launched LifeWork Calendar about a week ago on ProductHunt, and the response has floored us. In just a week, we saw thousands of people sign up to reclaim their work-life balance. For us, it was not only a confirmation that we had built something valuable, but an indicator that this is indeed a true pain point for so many busy professionals around the globe.

Users came from a variety of roles, seniorities, and backgrounds -- everyone from remote engineers to VPs of Product to founders -- but what they all had in common was a desire to get more control over the balance of their work and personal schedules.

With our launch behind us, we thought it might be fun to share some interesting trends and data we've discovered along the way as well as talk about what's coming next.

LifeWork by the numbers

Since our launch a few weeks ago, we've defended over 257,532 hours across 33,639 personal events. That's nearly half a lifetime's worth of personal stuff. Let's break it down:

  • 24,007 hours of travel
  • 937 hours of errands
  • 656 hours of doctor's appointments
  • 6,031 hours of vacation
  • 225,901 hours of other personal commitments (and maybe a job interview or two)

To us, this is a humbling statistic. Knowing that people are getting the time they need to live their lives is the reason we built LifeWork Calendar, and this shows that it's doing just that.

We've also noticed some interesting trends that illustrate how fluid work-life balance has become. For example, 83% of our users opted to block personal events both outside and inside of working hours. This tells us that for most people, work doesn't stop interrupting their lives just because it's quitting time at the office. We definitely expected most people to select this option, but the fact that more than 4 out of every 5 users chose it really tells us that we're truly living in the era of the Flipped Workplace.

To that end, we've noticed a couple of interesting trends around where personal events tend to show up:

  • Friday is the busiest day for personal events in terms of hours spent, with 21% of all personal event hours per week. Thursday is a close second, with about 16% of event hours taking place on that day.
  • 8am-9am  and 5pm-6pm are the two most-blocked-off hours in people's days, with 10% of all personal event hours happening at 8am and 7% of all personal event hours happening at 5pm.

Both of these trends make sense -- people tend to take off early on Fridays, and tend to do things like pick up kids or run errands bookending their days. All of this being said, we noticed that there is a pretty even spread of personal events between roughly 7am and 7pm, which indicates that most of our personal lives tend to get scheduled inside of our working hours.

LifeWork also enables people to decide how they want personal events to show up to others on their work calendars when they're blocked out, and here we saw quite a bit of variance:

  • 46% of users opted to show personal time blocks on their work calendars as "busy", and no other details;
  • 41% of users chose to show that they were busy for a "personal commitment";
  • 13% of users opted to go full-transparent, showing the titles of personal events on their work calendars.

We have a pretty strong opinion at Reclaim that time blocks on your calendar need to be intentional and specific in order to avoid being interrupted. It's incredibly common for your coworkers to look at your calendar and say "Are you really busy, or can I get a meeting?" We believe that if your calendar communicates your priorities clearly, it sends a very different message than the generic "busy signal".

Given that, we found it curious that so many people opted to show their personal events as busy blocks. It really indicates how much work we have to do on getting comfortable sharing context -- whether that's priorities in our work or in our lives -- about our calendars with our coworkers.

What's next?

We're cooking up some very cool stuff on our core product, Reclaim, with a public beta coming very soon. We've been working with a small group of 40 engineering, product, and design leaders across more than a dozen companies to fine-tune the experience, and we can't wait to share it with you.

In the meantime, we just launched a bunch of new features that we are super excited about. They're based on lots of feedback from our earliest users, and we think you're going to love them too.

If you haven't checked out LifeWork and gotten your calendars under control, you totally should. Stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

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Burnout Trends Report: 200+ Employee Stress Stats by Department

Task Management Trends Report: +200 Stats on Managers vs. Individual Contributors

Productivity Trends Report: One-on-One Meeting Statistics

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