Managing our calendars has become a full-time job—but it doesn't have to be

Like many knowledge workers, Jeremy Rhoades’ schedule seemed to grow more demanding by the day. Between customer calls, internal meetings, and critical project deadlines, everything felt urgent, and there was always something else on the horizon.

His colleagues felt the same way. Rhoades is a senior manager at 1Password, where he oversees a team of 45 people that includes engineers, solutions architects, and technical writers—and they were struggling, too. They had all begun to notice a growing tension: Despite their best efforts, the daily grind was carving away their time for focused work. Worse, it was impacting their personal lives. Late nights and sacrificed weekends became routine, leaving little room to recharge or reconnect.

Too often, managing your calendar can feel like a full-time job. There’s the constant flood of chat messages, emails, and last-minute meeting invites that can turn even the most meticulously crafted calendars into a chaotic scramble. And when you throw time zones, scheduling conflicts, and shifting deadlines into the mix, it can be a struggle to stay on top of it all. It’s no wonder something as simple as an updated agenda can leave so many people feeling overwhelmed.

But as it turned out, Rhoades and his team just didn’t have the right tool. The constant shuffle of meetings and customer calls that had become a weekly burden? It was AI that helped them “solve the struggle we had with calls and calendaring—making ourselves as available as possible while still protecting personal time,” said Rhoades.

Today, he credits the AI-powered scheduling tool Reclaim with a 25% boost in his team’s overall productivity. But just as important: by making it easier to maintain balance, defend focus time, and build routines that support the work that matters most, well-being across the team has also improved. “Reclaim has been the biggest lifesaver my team has had,” said Rhoades.

Giving people their time back

Before Rhoades and his team turned to AI for help, the calendar was both a tool and an obstacle. Every day, they wrestled with the challenge of finding focus amid a constant barrage of messages, meetings, and notifications. These distractions take a real toll, not just on our time, but on our potential. In 2023, a Dropbox-sponsored study from Economist Impact found that distractions like these cost knowledge workers, on average, more than 550 hours each year, with managers losing another 100 hours of productive time compared to other roles. That’s more than 10 hours a week, or two hours per day.

As the pace of work accelerated, Rhoades’ team felt this strain more acutely. Their internal meetings were logistical nightmares, with everyone scrambling to find slots that worked across time zones and alongside their daily responsibilities. “We weren’t solving the problems—that was the problem,” Jeremy admitted. “We tried to fix things with calendaring, but it was too rigid and didn’t do much to protect time.” Instead, their calendars filled up with overlapping meetings, looming deadlines, and little space for deep, uninterrupted work.

They tried creating shared calendars, hoping that greater visibility into everyone’s time would simplify scheduling. But this, too, only solved part of the problem. Calendars marked with blocks of “free” or “busy” time didn’t really capture the nuances of their day. Were Rhoades and his team deep in preparation for a critical customer call? Or simply taking a moment to breathe? Even with full calendar visibility, coworkers still didn’t get the complete picture of how flexible or rigid someone’s schedule really was.

Surveys have found that Rhoades isn’t alone. The average knowledge worker spends half their week in meetings‌, with an average of 17 meetings on their calendar—nearly half of which end up being rescheduled or skipped altogether. But as an external-facing team at 1Password, the stakes were even higher. Customer calls demanded availability, yet internal meetings and one-on-ones left few open slots, resulting in even more rescheduling and frustration. It became clear that without a better system, they would be caught in a never-ending cycle of inefficiency and burnout.

AI offered a solution—one that could automate schedules, protect focus time, and ultimately help teams collaborate more effectively. But that was just the start. AI-powered scheduling tools didn’t just promise to save Rhoades’ and his team time, but actually give them time back. Essentially, the pitch was: Imagine you had a tool that created 40% more time each week for solving your customers’ problems—for the work that mattered most. How much more impact could you have?

Making space for lunch again

Once Rhoades’ team gave the AI tool Reclaim permission to manage their schedules, the impact was immediate. By automating recurring meeting schedules, his team freed up an average of 1.3 hours per week previously lost to endless rescheduling. That small change also unlocked 4.3 more hours weekly for focused, productive work. The tool was even smart enough to recognize the importance of breaks between meetings, helping them avoid 18 back-to-back meetings each week.

Unlike traditional shared calendars that merely show "free" or "busy" time, an AI-powered schedule is personalized and adapts in real time. To get started, Rhoades’ team invested a little bit of time up front defining their priorities—things like personal commitments, working habits, important projects, and people they wanted to stay in contact with. After that, the AI scheduler dynamically managed each of their calendars to align with their goals and priorities, so that meetings, tasks, and habits were scheduled with true flexibility and focus in mind.

For example, instead of just displaying a person’s availability, Reclaim actively defended it—so that when priorities shifted, as they inevitably did, tentatively scheduled focus periods became firmly protected time. This way, people were more likely to schedule meetings in ways that aligned with everyone’s goals—empowering each person to work however and whenever made the most sense for them, without sacrificing opportunities for collaboration.

But for Rhoades, there was another big impact: thanks to AI, he was finally making space for lunch again. That’s not the luxury you might think it is, either. Economist Impact, in its Dropbox-sponsored study, found that regular downtime can actually enhance one’s ability to focus. It makes sense, then, that over 72% of 1Password employees have been using a Reclaim feature called Habits to schedule blocks for strategic planning, preparation time—and, yes, lunch breaks. 

In practice, the AI-powered feature has helped Rhoades and his colleagues add 6.4 hours of focused work time to their schedules each week that’d have otherwise been swallowed up by inefficiency. “Now, I can schedule 30 minutes within a window to sit on my porch and eat a sandwich,” Rhoades said. “It’s made me more productive—and less grumpy.”