Reclaim.ai Reveals Professionals Lose 10 Hours Per Week On Unproductive Tasks, Driving Stress Across 78.7% of Employees

The company launches paid plans and task integrations for teams to defend their time

Reclaim.ai, an intelligent calendar assistant and time management platform for Google Calendar used by over 9,000 companies worldwide, today released a free report on task management trends. The report reveals a widespread lack of focused task time for individuals and managers across various industries amid larger work loads, more meetings, and competing priorities during the Great Resignation and a reckoning for balance in the wake of the pandemic. In tandem with the report, Reclaim launched their first-ever team plans, with advanced task integrations and revealed early data on communicating task work through calendars for real-time recalibration and improved efficiency.

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Why can't employees find time to work? They're interrupted 31.6 times a day, attend 25.6 meetings a week, and spend 1.96 hours a day on unproductive task work, on average as discovered in the 2022 Task Management Trends Report at Reclaim.ai. (Graphic: Business Wire))

The Task Management Trends Report surveyed over 2,000 professionals – spanning engineers, product managers, support teams, marketers, consultants, and more – to analyze how managers and team members are prioritizing and defending their time for focused work across their increasingly busy workweeks, using project management platforms Jira, Asana, Todoist, Trello and ClickUp.

Since its start, Reclaim has delivered a free product supporting professionals across thousands of companies throughout the pandemic, and today marks a notable milestone and transition from supporting individual productivity to productive, balanced, and effective teams – marking this as a first step in a bigger journey of the product’s impact across productivity, time management, and capacity planning for organizations.

The report surveyed both managers and individual contributors, and found the following key insights about how managers spend time completing or assigning work:

• Only 13.1% of teams accomplish more than 70% of their planned tasks every week.
• 20.4% of managers spend more than 8 hours/week assigning, prioritizing, and reprioritizing tasks for their team, and 15.8% spend more than 14 hours/week.
• Managers want to defend an additional 9.4 hours/week for each of their team members to work on tasks, on average, to help meet their team’s goals.

For individual contributors, key findings included:

• Only 53.5% of individuals' planned tasks are completed every week.
• Only 16.8% of teams accomplish more than 70% of their planned tasks every week.
• 31.1% of teams accomplish less than 40% of their weekly planned tasks.

The report also looked at general productivity trends among managers, including:

• On average, 50.2% of managers' task time is spent on productive, focused work.
• Only 10.9% of managers are productive in more than 70% of their task time, on average.
• Only 26.9% of managers average more than 4 hours/day on their own task work, and 9% average more than 6 hours/day
• On average, managers waste 1.82 hours/day on unproductive task work like checking emails, Slack, or sifting through their task list.

Outside of the unnecessary meetings that tend to pile up on the calendar, managers are also trying to help their employees defend focus time for task work on the calendar, and prevent interruptions that pull their attention away to low-value tasks like Slack, email, or bouncing around a scattered task list. Reclaim found that 23.4% of people feel like their workload has increased due to The Great Resignation and 78.7% of people experience stress due to increasing tasks and lack of time to get it all done every week.

“We’re living in a world of increasing demands, ever-shifting priorities and an unprecedented need for clear communication across teams, projects and organizations,” says Patrick Lightbody, CEO and co-founder of Reclaim.ai. “Since we launched Reclaim a little over 2 years ago, we’ve helped busy professionals block over 24 million hours for focused work. With our new integrations, we make it even easier for organizations to connect their priorities from existing systems of record, for employees to know exactly what they should be working on, and for the calendar to finally be a reflection of what matters across the company.”

After implementing Reclaim’s task integrations, users reported that it made them more productive, effective, and focused within their workweeks. On average, users reported that they can now:

• Defend 5.7 additional hours per week for productive task work
• Take 2.3 fewer meetings/week by using the calendar to communicate task work
• Prioritize and determine what work to take on next 41.1% more effectively

In November 2021, Reclaim introduced Smart 1:1s to automate the toil of scheduling and rescheduling one-on-one meetings for teams – without attendees having to worry about timezones, working hours, or mutual availability. Since launching, Reclaim has scheduled time for nearly 2 million hours of 1:1 meetings, saving knowledge workers countless hours of their workweek managing their calendars.

“Reclaim has become an essential tool for our employees to stay focused on their most important work, and in helping both our makers and managers to prioritize and plan their projects across teams,” says Raj Dutt, CEO of Grafana. “It’s such a huge part of Grafana’s culture that we’ve actually embedded it into our official new hire onboarding process. Reclaim ensures that our managers set their teams up for success, engage with them regularly and flexibly, and leave no one behind. We're excited to partner with Reclaim and can't wait to see them shape the future of work this year and beyond.”

Beyond Grafana, other organizations have used Reclaim in their onboarding process for new hires and it has ushered in a new era of efficiency void of unnecessary disruptors and lack of balance. With Reclaim, employees – and now teams – can make realistic plans for their weeks that reflect the flexibility and work-life balance of modern workplaces, prevent burnout and attrition, and keep everyone moving in the right direction.

About Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai is an intelligent calendar assistant and time management platform for Google Calendar used by over 9,000 companies worldwide including Calendly, Grafana, Shape Therapeutics, Postman, and more. In addition to helping busy professionals make time for their important work, Reclaim issues quarterly productivity trends reports that highlight how teams are optimizing their workweeks in the modern workplace. To learn more, please visit https://reclaim.ai/.

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