How to Migrate from Reclaim.ai to Aftertone (2026)

Reclaim is a good tool for what it does: protecting recurring commitments inside Google Calendar. If you're leaving, the reasons are usually one of three things — it doesn't work with anything other than Google Calendar, there's no standalone app to plan or review your day inside, or the automation protects your time without ever telling you whether that protected time was productive.

Aftertone addresses all three. It's a native Mac app with its own interface for planning and reviewing your week. The AI doesn't automate your schedule — it analyses the one you build, surfaces patterns in your productivity data, and gives you a weekly report on whether the structure you're creating is actually working. The habits and focus blocks Reclaim was defending automatically become time blocks you schedule intentionally, with feedback on how they're performing over time.

This guide covers what to export before you leave, how to recreate your structure in Aftertone, and what the planning shift actually looks like in practice.

What changes — and what doesn't

Why people migrate from Reclaim to Aftertone

Reclaim's automation is its strength and its ceiling. Smart Capture converts pasted text or a screenshot into structured tasks instantly. Auto-Extend keeps the session running when you finish a task early. Pause holds your place. It creates recurring focus blocks and habit windows — and defends them reliably. But that's where the intelligence stops. After months of Reclaim-protected calendars, most users know their focus blocks are being created. They don't know whether those blocks are producing real output, whether their morning deep work time has been gradually eroded over the past quarter, or whether the structure Reclaim is maintaining bears any relationship to the conditions under which they do their best thinking.

The second limitation is structural: there's no Reclaim app to open. Your daily planning happens in Google Calendar. Your weekly review — if it happens at all — happens wherever you chose to do it, with no data from Reclaim to inform it. There's no interface for understanding your own patterns because Reclaim was never built to be one.

Aftertone adds both things. The native Mac app gives you a dedicated space to plan the week, work through the day, and review what happened. The AI weekly and daily reports give you the data Reclaim never surfaced: which week structures work, which don't, and what the gap between your planned schedule and actual behaviour tells you about where to focus your attention.

Before you cancel Reclaim: what to record

Reclaim doesn't have a comprehensive data export. Before cancelling, manually note the following — it takes less than 15 minutes and prevents you from having to reconstruct these from memory:

Your habits: Open Reclaim's Habits section and list every active habit — name, duration, ideal time of day, and how flexible you marked it. These become your recurring time blocks in Aftertone.

Your focus block rules: Note how many hours of focus time Reclaim was scheduling per day and at what priority level. This becomes your weekly block template in Aftertone.

Your task integrations: If Reclaim was pulling tasks from Todoist, Asana, Linear, or other tools, note which integrations you had active. You'll manage those tasks directly in Aftertone or continue in your task tool alongside Aftertone.

Your scheduling link settings: If you were using Reclaim's scheduling links for client or colleague booking, note your availability windows. You'll need an alternative — Fantastical or Calendly — for scheduling links, as Aftertone doesn't include them.

Your Google Calendar: Reclaim writes focus blocks and habit events directly to Google Calendar. These will appear in Aftertone when you connect your account. Some you'll want to keep; most you'll replace with intentionally scheduled blocks. Note which recurring events are Reclaim-generated so you can clean them up.

Step 1 — Install Aftertone and connect Google Calendar

1. Download Aftertone from aftertone.io and install it on your Mac

2. Open Aftertone and complete the onboarding

3. Connect your Google Calendar account — the same one Reclaim was using

4. Your existing events, meetings, and any Reclaim-generated calendar blocks will appear immediately

Step 2 — Clean up Reclaim's calendar footprint

Reclaim creates calendar events for focus blocks, habits, and scheduled tasks. Once you stop using Reclaim, these events remain in your Google Calendar — and in your Aftertone view — as orphaned blocks with no system behind them.

To clean up efficiently:

1. Open Google Calendar in your browser

2. Check whether Reclaim created a separate calendar layer (common) or added events directly to your primary calendar

3. If a separate Reclaim calendar exists: Settings → My Calendars → [Reclaim calendar] → Delete — this removes all Reclaim-generated events at once

4. If Reclaim events are in your primary calendar, use Google Calendar's search to find and delete recurring Reclaim events in bulk

After cleanup, your Aftertone view will show only real meetings and commitments — the clean foundation to build your intentional schedule on.

Step 3 — Cancel Reclaim

In Reclaim, go to Settings → Billing → Cancel plan. If you're on a paid plan, your access continues until the end of the billing period. Use that window to complete setup in Aftertone before the Reclaim calendar events disappear entirely.

If you're on Reclaim's free tier, cancellation is immediate — no billing consideration needed.

Step 4 — Set up your project structure

Aftertone organises tasks by project. Before adding tasks, create the project categories that reflect your actual work:

1. Open the Projects section in Aftertone

2. Create one project per major area of work — client names, ongoing initiatives, administrative categories

3. Keep this list short. Five to eight projects covers most individual workflows. Too many projects creates the same friction as too many tags.

Step 5 — Add your active tasks

If you were using Reclaim's task scheduling from a connected tool (Todoist, Asana, Linear), your tasks still live there. You have two options:

Option A — Continue using your task tool alongside Aftertone: Keep your tasks in Todoist or Asana, and manually drag the relevant ones into Aftertone's time blocks each morning during your daily planning. This works well if your task tool is deeply integrated into your team's workflow.

Option B — Move tasks into Aftertone's native task management: Use Aftertone's global keyboard shortcut (⌥ Space by default) to capture tasks from anywhere on your Mac. Smart Zoning moves tasks directly onto the calendar with keyboard shortcuts. Type the task name, assign it to a project, add a due date if relevant. This creates a single system where tasks and calendar live together.

Most individual users find Option B cleaner. The keyboard shortcut capture is fast enough that it replaces the habit of opening a separate task app for most inputs.

Step 6 — Rebuild your habits as recurring blocks

This is the most direct translation from Reclaim's model to Aftertone's. In Reclaim, you defined habits and the tool found slots for them automatically. In Aftertone, you decide on those slots yourself and block them explicitly — with the AI then tracking whether they hold across the week.

Using the notes you made in the pre-cancellation step, create a recurring time block for each habit:

• Deep work / focus blocks: Block your best hours before meetings typically land — for most people, 8–11am. Make these the first blocks you place in the week view before anything else.

• Exercise / wellness habits: Block these as fixed events in Google Calendar (which syncs to Aftertone). Treat them identically to external meetings — non-negotiable.

• Buffer time: Leave 20–30 minutes before and after each meeting deliberately unblocked. This is the buffer Reclaim was adding automatically. In Aftertone, you build it into the template consciously.

• Review / planning time: Block 30 minutes Friday afternoon for your weekly review — the session where you read your Aftertone AI report and plan the following week.

The difference from Reclaim's automation is that you're now making a weekly commitment to these blocks rather than having them generated. The research supports this being an advantage, not a downgrade. Peter Gollwitzer's implementation intention research consistently shows that specifying when and where you'll execute a behaviour — as a deliberate commitment rather than an automated output — produces meaningfully higher follow-through. Reclaim made the habit blocks efficient to create. Intentional blocking makes them more likely to hold under pressure.

Step 7 — Schedule your first week

1. Open Aftertone's week view — your Google Calendar meetings are already populated

2. Place your recurring blocks first: deep work windows, buffer slots, review time

3. Fill remaining slots with tasks from your inbox — match cognitively demanding work to morning slots, administrative work to afternoon

4. Be specific in what you name each block — "write intro section of Q2 report" rather than "report work." Specificity is what Gollwitzer's research identifies as the mechanism that makes plans become actions.

5. Leave slots empty. Reclaim often fills the day fully. Leaving 20% of available time unblocked absorbs the things that always appear unannounced.

Step 8 — Use the Focus Screen

When a block begins, activate Aftertone's Focus Screen. The interface narrows to the current task only. If you finish early, the Focus Screen presents your next scheduled tasks as numbered options — pick one and the calendar updates. If something urgent lands mid-block, you surface it and the system adjusts.

Reclaim created the focus block. It had no view on what happened inside it. The Focus Screen is Aftertone's answer to that gap — an execution environment designed around Roy Baumeister's decision fatigue research, which shows that reducing visible alternatives at the moment of task-start measurably improves both the quality of the work and persistence through it.

Step 9 — Read your first weekly report

After your first full week, your AI weekly report will surface. It covers which days and time slots produced the most completed work, where planned blocks were executed versus skipped, how your meeting-to-focus ratio compared to previous weeks (once you have a few weeks of data), and specific recommendations for the following week.

This is the layer Reclaim was always missing. Reclaim told you when your focus time was. Aftertone tells you whether it worked — and what the pattern across your weeks reveals about how to configure the next one.

Common questions from Reclaim migrants

Reclaim was free. Is Aftertone worth paying for?

Reclaim's free tier is genuinely useful, which makes this a fair question. The comparison is between automated focus block creation at no cost versus a native Mac productivity system with AI weekly analysis at $30/month with a 7-day free trial. If Reclaim's automation was solving your problem completely — your focus time was protected, your habits were holding, and you had clear visibility into whether your schedule was working — there's no reason to move. If any of those three things wasn't true, Aftertone addresses what Reclaim couldn't. The 7-day free trial means you can evaluate it risk-free.

I need scheduling links for client booking. Does Aftertone include them?

No — Aftertone doesn't include scheduling links. If you were using Reclaim's Smart Links for client or colleague booking, you'll need an alternative. Fantastical (included in Flexibits Premium at $40/yr) and Morgen (Pro at $15/mo) both include scheduling links alongside their calendar features. Calendly remains an option as a standalone tool.

Will Reclaim's automated focus blocks keep working after I cancel?

No. Reclaim's automation stops when you cancel your account. Any recurring focus blocks or habit events Reclaim was generating will no longer be created. Events already on your calendar remain until their recurrence ends or you delete them. This is why the cleanup step matters — you want to remove Reclaim's orphaned events before building your Aftertone schedule on top of them.

What if I still want some automation — can I use Reclaim and Aftertone together?

You can, though the overlap creates complexity. If you use Reclaim to auto-create focus blocks in Google Calendar and Aftertone to plan and analyse your week, the two systems will show different pictures of your time. Reclaim's auto-generated blocks will appear in Aftertone's calendar view but won't be linked to Aftertone tasks. Most users find it cleaner to commit to one approach — intentional scheduling in Aftertone — rather than layering automation underneath it.

Reclaim connected to my Todoist. Can Aftertone do that?

Aftertone has native task management built in rather than pulling from external tools. You can continue using Todoist as your task capture system and manually drag priority tasks into Aftertone's time blocks during morning planning — or migrate your task capture into Aftertone's keyboard shortcut system. Most users who make the full switch find the native task management sufficient for individual workflow. If your Todoist is shared with a team, keeping it alongside Aftertone is the sensible approach.

The planning shift in practice

The adjustment from Reclaim to Aftertone is less dramatic than it sounds. Reclaim's automation was creating structure that you then worked inside. Aftertone asks you to create that structure yourself — but gives you a dedicated interface to do it in, and AI that tells you each week whether the structure you created is producing results.

The shift is from passive structure (Reclaim creates the blocks, you work in them) to intentional structure (you create the blocks, the AI tells you how they went). For users who found Reclaim's automation convenient but opaque, that's a trade worth making. For users who found the automation was solving the problem completely, staying on Reclaim's free tier is the right answer.

If you're in the middle — the automation is useful but you want more visibility into whether it's working — Aftertone is the natural next step.