RescueTime 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

It is helpful for some insight and for team accountability.

About 4 years into my business I took on outside investors. Both as a good-faith external gesture as well as internally-focused improvement, undertook a whole series of policy and operational changes to increase transparency and allow people to hold themselves accountable. One small part of these efforts was rescuetime, which 10 years later is ironically is the only single-decision that was 100% correct then and now. We use their data as inputs to all sorts of other business processes, both weekly and for year-end reviews. I recommend it constantly, it truly is a no-brainer because as long as you can install software and spend more than a couple hours a day on computers/phones, you will get value out of it... not just immediately but over time.

I am currently trying to use rescue time for personal time trend awareness, but it seems to be more work and time spent to set up and maintain for my purposes than it saves me. I think this tool would be better if individual activities could be labelled as productive or otherwise, without needing to create a new category to apply it differently from similar tasks that are on the opposite end of the productivity spectrum. For instance, facebook should generally be a distraction, but if you use LinkedIn or other professional social media on a regular basis, it shouldn't require you to create a special setup just to have that one app or website treated as productive time without labeling facebook as the same importance. Seems like an oversight to me, but perhaps I just needed to use the category system more readily.

I use Rescue Time to stay productive and track my billable hours.

I primarily use it to understand and track my own efficiency and make sure that what I am actually doing aligns with my strategic and operational directives.

It takes some time initially to categorize your app activities with the tag setup you want. But once it's done it's a thing of beauty. I use it to track that I'm spending enough time doing revenue generating activities for my business. And to make sure I'm not spending too much time doing things I shouldn't. I even use this to guide our company org chart. If I'm spending too much time on certain activities, I can see what is worth delegating or automating.

Using Rescue Time has been invaluable as an easy way to track my productivity & effectiveness. It has enabled me to reduce my distractions as well as use my more productive times more efficiently.

I've used RescueTime for years. It's the ultimate in "set and forget" software. Essentially it sits on your computer and silently watches your productivity, totaling up the time you spend doing actual work and the time you spend goofing off. At the end of the week you get a nice little email report telling you how you did. It does a great job not shaming you when you do poorly, as I have many times. When you have a really productive week, however, it rewards you by documenting that fact.

Rescue time helped me to capture my app and website behaviour and thus made it possible to identify areas where I could cut back on wasting time or streamline the usage of an app. This was especially obvious with the use of e-mail. Now I try to stick to certain times a day which cut back the time of e-mail usage significantly. Also if you already have the feeling that you spent too much time with distracting activities you can block them.

Easiest way to track productivity and time spent across applications/categories.