Reclaim

As my engineering workload became more technically demanding, I began noticing a subtle but exhausting pattern. The issue was never a lack of organisation or forgetting what needed to get done. It was the heavy, continuous cognitive tax of constantly deciding what deserved my attention next.

Traditional productivity methods like the Eisenhower Matrix or "Eat the Frog" are designed to prioritise tasks, but they completely ignore human context and real-time cognitive capacity. They assume you have unlimited mental energy every day, failing to recognise when a high-cortisol inbox should soften expectations, or when you have already spent eight hours deep in complex development.

I did not need another task manager to nag me. I needed an intelligent system that could look at my workload holistically and remind me when it was time to stop.

Reclaim started almost entirely by accident during a late-night experiment with Google Apps Script. I wanted to see if I could write a small prototype that would parse my unread emails each morning and generate a concise daily executive briefing using Google's Gemini API. The goal was not to build a grand application or commercial product; I simply asked myself:

The result was an instant turning point in how I viewed my digital environment. Instead of wading through dozens of emails every morning, I opened a clear, AI-generated summary highlighting critical conversations, deadlines, and client priorities.

That single experiment changed how I thought about Google Workspace as a whole. If AI could parse my email, why could it not understand my calendar? And if it understood my calendar density, why could it not evaluate how intense today actually was - deciding whether my energy should be directed toward deep technical work, light admin, or restorative recovery? That small script gradually became the engine behind Reclaim.

At the start of 2026, I set a quiet personal resolution to break a long cycle of chronic stress and physical fatigue. Solo remote work and demanding parenting meant basic self-care had become an afterthought. Refilling a water bottle, taking vitamins, or stepping outside for sunlight was constantly deferred with the promise of "I'll do it when I finish this task" - which often meant three days later.

I also realised that relying on the short school run for daily exercise was an illusion - school does not run on weekends or during holidays in April, July, August, October, and December. For someone who used to be active, sitting at a desk all day was taking a heavy toll. Working from home can also be isolating; time-blindness meant I frequently forgot to check in with friends.

Reclaim naturally evolved from a pure work dashboard into a digital sanctuary: a system that measures not only the software I ship, but whether I am staying healthy and energized enough to keep doing great work tomorrow.