Consistently great, but dangerous for managers

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.

Pros

Provides a great little nudge to remind you that when you're on your computer working, you should, be, like, working... the free offering is excellent, allowing you do a semi-deep dive into your data, seeing what you're doing most and helping you improve

Cons

The software is great, and the portal too, but the thing I worry about most is this sort of thing getting in the hands of (bad) developer managers, who might use it to spy on their employees, firing the least "productive" ones. Truly, everyone needs a break now and then, so it worries me a bit that this powerful program could fall into the wrong hands. "With great power comes great responsibility", that sort of thing.. The other thing is the feature set has not changed much in recent years. Subtle improvements could go along way... for instance, I wish it could help me with is filling in my timesheet each week. Imagine if it could tell me which solutions i have open most often in VS Code, for example, and I could charge my time to each project.

If I wasn't so cheap, I'd pay for it

While it's not the easy user experience to figure out, it's still a really helpful tool to reconstructing a day.

Pros

It's so helpful when recreating your day. We have to log every hour we spend, so we know what's billable and what's not, and some days I'm so all over the place I forget what I've done all day, so this helps me figure it out.

It's also really nice that you can set your own designations for what's "productive" and what's "distracting." For most companies, Facebook would be "very distracting," but we actually do a lot of social media work for our clients, so it can be "productive" time for us. Just nice to have that flexibility.

And the weekly emails are a nice reminder about how time adds up.

Cons

For a short period of time, I was able to use the "FocusTime" feature, which was awesome. I essentially turned off your access to programs or websites that were listed as "distracting." It pretty much stopped you from being your own enemy. I wish that was still part of the free version, b/c it was very helpful.

Also, it's pretty clunky getting through the report of how you spent your time. You either have to look at it by category (Very Productive, Productive, Neutral, Distracting, Very Distracting) individually, or by task (Communication, Business, etc.), there's not just a way to see a full list of everything. And navigating between the different views isn't easy, but you get the hang of it.

My favorite solution for seeing where time is spent

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

Pros

Rescuetime automatically tracks and categorizes the activities of you and your team. It makes it easy to see what areas and applications you might be spending more time in than expected. The weekly report emails are great and the productivity score is a nice way to get a glance at productivity vs previous months.

Cons

I would like if there was a different way to categorize specific files from different projects into projects within rescuetime. There may be a way to make a solution like this happen with the current features, but if I could tag certain portions of time towards specific projects it would give me further insight not only on the type of work I am doing (development, communication), but into the specific project that time was spent on. This is a small niche need though and it hasn't stopped me from using Rescuetime.

Track your productivity (or unproductivity) with email reports

Pros

RescueTime runs in the background of my computer, tracking every single minute that I spend on the computer. Because it has a huge and comprehensive database of apps and websites that it categorizes as productive or unproductive, it can automatically break down for me how much time I've spend in the day/week as productive (or not), and whether I've reached the goals that I've set up myself on the website. I love the email reports that they send to me, letting me know how much time I've actually spent on my work.

Cons

The included software on the Mac looks rudimentary, but it's not even something I have to deal with because it just runs in the background in the menu bar. It doesn't offer an option to hide the menu bar icon, so if that bothers you you'll need something like Bartender to hide it.

Great tool for staying productive

I have recommended this product to our attorneys. Great way to keep track of how much time you spend weekly on business related activities on your workstation.

Pros

Easy to use: RescueTime is very intuitive and easy to use. Once it is downloaded and installed, it starts automatically.
Easy to customize: It just takes a few clicks to tell RescueTime which activities are productive for your business.
Weekly summary report: RescueTime doesn't blow up your inbox, but rather sends a weekly summary to help you keep your time spent on business on track.
Tracks the user on multiple workstations: If you use more than one workstation, RescueTime will aggregate your time.
Regular, easy updates: RescueTime updates come out regularly, and take a single click. Yay!
Great value for the money: I use the FREE version, and it does what I need.

Cons

I can't think of any cons. However, I have not use the paid version of RescueTime, so I don't know what features or benefits I am missing out on.

So that's where all my time goes ... writing software reviews.

Pros

I've been using the free version for some time now. It was really interesting at first, now I generally ignore it. But, I should probably take a look at my reports again to see how I'm doing.

I'm impressed that it not only keeps track of time spent browsing different sites but time spent using local programs (Word, Excel, or even Remote Desktop, but not the specific usage on a remote computer).

You can specify a category and how productive or distracting each website or program is. This is really helpful because a site could be productive for some people and distracting for others, depending on the type of work you do.

Cons

Sometimes I wish that it kept more history. I think it does if you pay for it. So, that makes sense.

I just have it on my Windows desktop. I tried to add it to my android phone once and it didn't seem to work well. But, to be honest I didn't try very hard to get it setup.

RescueTime helps you manage the most limited resource you have.

Pros

I love that RescueTime is both easy to use, requiring very little setup, and also infinitely customizable, meaning that over time you can mold it to exactly what you want it to be doing. For instance, in tracking how productively you are using your time, it already knows that certain websites are distracting and certain ones are productive, but if your work requires you to spend some time on a specific "distracting" website, you can re-categorize it as needed to capture that.

Cons

I have very few complaints about RescueTime. I feel like it does everything I need it to do. If anything, I wish the free version had more features, but I am more than happy to pay for the premium version to get the features I need.

Identify & highlight distractions

I had experienced a drop in my income as a self-employed consultant. I felt that I was always busy, but was billing less, and this software made it clear to me that I was indeed busy all day, but on many distractions that were not contributing to income or projects, but were costing time and my energy. RescueTime put me back on track, and I have stayed there for the past two years. Savings/earnings are of the order per annum, I kid you not.

Pros

This software helped me to objectively and quantitatively identify which distractions were doing most damage to my daily income.
By seeing it in front of me and putting against it, I was able to instantly cut those activities out completely or minimise them.

Cons

No cons, really. The software is unobtrusive, not pushy, it just does its thing well.

The stats will surprise you

Definitely worth it.

Pros

Rescuetime has mostly helped me whittle down little time sinks that I was unaware of. For example, it turned out I spent 30 minutes a day selecting songs on iTunes; now I have a playlist on shuffle and do not actively use iTunes anymore to select my music during the work day.

Rescuetime has often surprised me by showing stats being very different from how I perceived them. It can also be motivated to see a highly productive day unfolding and feeling competitive with yourself.

Cons

Currently Rescuetime cannot distinguish browser tabs in Firefox. Other apps like Timedoctor can, so I'm sure Rescuetime could fix this if they'd commit to it.

Never realized how much time I was wasting!

It's been a great way to see a true summary of how I'm spending my time and ensure that I'm being mindful of my use of the internet. The accountability makes me more productive during work hours, because I want my weekly report to be positive!

Pros

The ability to sync across multiple devices - I use it on my work laptop, my personal laptop, and my mobile phone. This gives me a much clearer idea of how I'm spending my online life. I also like the weekly email that sums up my time logged, as well as the ability to recategorize certain apps. For example, I use Twitter for work, so I don't want it to count as "very distracting."

Cons

I wish there was an easier way to note when I'm being productive vs. when I'm wasting time on the same app. Sometimes I use Instagram for work and sometimes I use it for pleasure, and there's no way I've found to differentiate the uses.

Game Changing App If You Track Your Time Hourly

It's a great way for me to track my time across different computers. I use it to make sure I'm recording all of my time in my daily time sheets that I use to bill clients at the end of the month.

Pros

I really like that it's simple and efficient at tracking and grouping the time I spend online so that I can use that data to update my daily timesheets.

Cons

It would be great if it would group some of the time into more specific categories - it will just say "Adwords" and it would be great if they had the campaign number so I can see which client where I actually spent my time. That said, I use the free version so that feels like a crap compliant considering I use it all the time and it's free.

Simple to use, takes a little bit of setup, but worth it

Good weekly reporting of time usage, with decent granularity. It's totally out of the way and does everything without me thinking about it now that I have all of my apps and regular websites categorized.

Pros

It's really easy to use and once you go through setting things up it takes no thought or effort. It just runs in the background and reports weekly. Knowing that it's running helps me stay on task.

Cons

The auto-categorization works okay, but I needed to spend a good chunk of time custom categorizing various apps and websites because it was throwing off my reporting. (But I AM glad that they at least allow you that option)