If you’re looking for an AI planner solution like Dreamtask, your options are slim. Reclaim.ai is a mature option for those who want their tasks thrown into their Google Calendar. However, integrating it with your Notion tasks is not easy. In short, Dreamtask is more purpose-built for Notion users. But let’s dive deep into the pro’s and con’s of each tool.

Overview

Reclaim AI is a tool that automatically schedules your tasks into your (Google) calendar. It also has a great feature for booking meetings. In addition, there are all sorts of bells and whistles such as analytics, personal time tracking, etc. In a nutshell, Reclaim AI is like Motion-lite - more focused on individuals than teams. The similarities to Motion are numerous - both were founded in 2019, both have received about 13M in venture capital funding, and both have roughly similar features. Read my Dreamtask vs Motion comparison here.

Dreamtask is an AI Planner purpose built for Notion users. It works with your existing Notion task database, with virtually no switching costs.

Frankly, a head to head comparison between the features of Reclaim AI and Dreamtask is not important. Dreamtask is still in its infancy and does not have the rich feature set of more established productivity apps. It is more important to understand the philosophy behind each tool so that you can decide which is right for you.

On that note, I will spend the rest of this article focused on a few issues in Reclaim AI that turn out to be super important for any productivity tool.

Priorities

Reclaim AI has a prioritization system that has 4 levels: critical, high, medium, and low. Based on these priorities, it will shuffle your schedule around to make sure you work on critical tasks first, high priority second, etc.

Before I created Dreamtask, I tried using a prioritization system like this. There’s one problem: this directly conflicts with another prioritization system - one that is much older and won’t go away…

Deadlines!

Deadlines are the purest form of prioritization, and no other system can replace it or even override it. If you have a “low priority” task that is due tomorrow, is it really “low priority”? No.

The fact is that when you use deadlines properly, you don’t need another system for prioritization. Worse, that other system will just confuse you and stress you out.

Don’t believe me? Here are some common refrains:

“I don’t set deadlines for most tasks”

That’s fine. Some tasks don’t have a deadline. Most of your tasks are things you do for yourself. However, that means they’re not important nor are they urgent. If you are working on something important, and you want to get it done, give it an artificial deadline. Artificial deadlines are deadlines that you just make up - nobody is sitting there waiting for you to meet the deadlines. They’ve been proven time and time again to increase productivity in a way that “prioritization” doesn’t.

“what if two tasks have the same deadline”?

What if two tasks have the same deadline and priority? You can’t escape this conundrum no matter what system you use. There’s only one way out: get both done, or decide which one is more important.

“Using priorities is easier and more intuitive than setting artificial deadlines”

If you’ve been doing things this way for years, and you’re used to it, then by all means go use Reclaim AI. However, what you’re doing is making a trade-off: doing something easy in the short term that will complicate your life in the long term.

It is true that when I create new tasks, I would much rather just say “this is high priority” then say “this should be due roughly on December 1st”. However, it is that kind of undisciplined thinking that leads to a huge list of “high priority” tasks that I then need to recategorize.

The beauty of using deadlines is that they are way more specific and way more flexible.

Specific

If you’re planning two weeks ahead, you have 10-14 levels of priorities - one for each day (or working day). In contrast, with the simpler prioritization system, you only have 4 (critical, high, medium, low).

Flexible

Most deadlines are made to be pushed. When they are pushed, their order is preserved - soft deadlines get pushed back like boxes on a conveyor belt. They can also be pushed past hard deadlines - things that absolutely need to get done - so that you can meet your external commitments.

Dreamtask’s philosophy around prioritization is that deadlines are king. If something is critical, then it should be due today with a hard deadline. If something is low priority, then it should have a soft deadline far in the future (or no deadline at all).

Complexity

While Reclaim AI supports deadlines, it suffers from the same pitfall that most other productivity tools do - it is complex in the wrong places and simple in the wrong places. For example, you can assign both a priority and a deadline - but you can’t specify if a deadline is hard (strict) or soft (flexible).

Reclaim AI’s smart meeting scheduler is great for super large teams - but it doesn’t allow you to edit your Google Calendar meetings from within the app. Again, a simple feature that gets overlooked for fancy functionality (#fancyfunctionality should catch on soon) like AI-assisted meeting scheduling.

Conclusion

Frankly, I’d love to use Reclaim AI (or Motion for that matter) and if you’re not attached to Notion as your task manager, I’d give it a shot as it has much lower prices than Motion. However, if you’re a Notion diehard like me, you’ll notice that none of these other tools have a Notion integration.

If you want similar smart task scheduling features as these tools, but don’t want to leave Notion, give Dreamtask a try - you won’t regret it.