The best time-tracking tool. Period.

The only time management app that helps me take control of my time

I've spent significantly less time on social media since I implemented RescueTime in my system and, I now have a very detailed insight on how much time I spend on productive time. RescueTime helps me focus. I cannot recommend RescueTime enough.​

Pros

Even though it is not a time tracker in the sense of providing info to clients, I've chosen RescueTime over all other time management software. Why? Because it helps me focus, and it gives me a clear insight into how I spend my time, both online and offline. The best part: I hardly need to fill in anything, the app provides all the details of sites and apps I use on my computer and, my phone. It takes some time, in the beginning, to set things up; you have to teach the app what you consider very productive, productive, neutral, distractive, or very distractive. But, then, it gives a clear overview of your productivity on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. As a pro-subscriber, I can also fill in time I did not spend on my computer. ​ Besides: In RescueTime,​ I can set focus time; After spending more than one hour on distracting time during work hours, ​the app blocks all websites and apps I consider distracting.

Cons

The only thing I am missing is the possibility​ to assign work to projects and, clients. It would make it perfect!

Bottom-Up Objectivity Yields No-brainer 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.

Pros

No brainer- install it with no configuration, and you instantly get personalized and valuable weekly reports. Works on windows/mac/linux/android/iphone so can be used by anyone in company or any external team. Excellent user-interface, very easy to customize to each user's specific goals if they choose to do so.

Cons

The phone-based apps didn't seem to automatically categorize calls w/known contacts. Sometimes if a given site hosted applications with two different goals/intentions/categories, this at minimum much trickier to track properly and

One of the best in the market

Pros

It's usage tracking abilities across multiple devices is definitely its killer feature

Cons

Its API capabilities are very limited and new features seem to make the product worse rather than better

Slightly underwhelming

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.

Pros

This software does pick up a lot of useful data, and allows you to quickly see what things you do on the computer and how the trends flow during your day or week. There is a lot of good information, simple to install and use generally, and overall a decent experience.

Cons

I dislike the fact that you can't really customize things without lots of tedium in the categories and other areas. Also, the ability to change tracked sections of the day or week are somewhat limited; there are only one or two generic filters for declaring which days and hours to run the tracking. I have noticed that the categories are geared mostly toward organizations more than individuals. I have realized that if I customize categories to make a certain activity productive time instead of distracted time, it won't let me change just that one activity to be productive without bringing the entire category along with it.