What are RescueTime users saying about the software?

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.

Great automatic activity tracker, with only the limitations of that approach

RescueTime is a very well-designed solution for automatic activity tracking; I am just no longer really convinced that this is the right approach (for me). The focus on applications (not projects) makes the collected data of limited value (for me). I still use it, since it is free and doesn't hurt, but I am not relying on the collected data for analyzing my working patterns anymore

Pros

Tracks what you work one completely automatically, reliably records all applications used, gives automatic ratings how “productive” certain applications are

Cons

Updating the Linux client could be smoother / better automated.

Frictionaless Time Tracking

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.

Pros

It works in the background, I don't need to remember to turn it on or off. No need to disposition time regularly so it doesn't interfere with organic or non-linear workflows. I can go back and disposition all at once at the end of the day or very few days.

Cons

Update frequency seems high and sometimes the update pop-up is intrusive.

Productivity Tracker for Remote workers

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

Pros

It is easy to use. It has productivity reports at the end of the day. It helps me stay on track with my tasks daily. And it is invaluable for tracking billable hours.

Cons

Interface looks dated and a bit clunky. But it is a great software for tracking my productivity.

The best time-tracking tool. Period.

Overall, I have a much better understanding how I am using my time. I have spotted a lot of time-consuming activies and removed or limited them, while increasing the beneficial activities. I am very happy with the software and intend to use it in the future too.

Pros

This software has been a game-changer, and I have been a happy paying customer now for more than three years. The tracking is very precise and works on all of my devices. Reports and analytics are easy to understand, and the software allows a lot of customization when it comes to recorded activities and their categorization. All in all a top product.

Cons

The only thing I don't like about RescueTime is that it can records me on multiple devices at the same time and counts those as separate. For example, I may listen to something on Youtube on my cellphone while I work on the laptop. RescueTime would then add both Youtube-time (harmful) and working time in its records. That can of course be changed by either modifying the records later or turning the tracking off prior to situations like this. However, I wish there will be some AI in the future to make this part more intelligent.

Great for finding "time leaks" in productivity

RescueTime has helped me increase my productivity, by pointing out where my time is truly spent.

Pros

I love the weekly emailed report on productivity. It’s helped me find and fix "time leaks" in my productivity.

Cons

I don’t use this for billing, because I jump in and out of local software as well as multiple websites for each project, making connecting the time to different projects too complex, so I use another piece of software for project time tracking.

No more asking where your spend your time

Pros

I really like that I can see where I spend - or waste - most of my time.

Cons

I would really appreciate if it was translated in a few other languages, like French. It would make it easier for me to recommend it to my French speaking friends.

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.

Grade your productivity

It’s free, and in the first week you will see the transformation it can make at your day job. You'll see where you are wasting too much time, and what you have to cut out in order to stop losing attention on what really matters. Tip for the development team: Please do, invest in design, the product is good and affordable, a good UI/UX project can bring a great perception of value.

Pros

I was first introduced at rescue time by a work colleague, he was claiming that he could do pomodoro time, and in the end of the day he knew how much focused and productive he had been. I was curious out by this tool, so I start using it and became impressed in how simple and silent it was, it was just a icon occult in my taskbar. It demands only 3mb of pc memory and maps everything that I do. He is aware of the types of websites I'm accessing because he already has a database. However I had to edit some sites as research/work/etc. (like my company website).

Cons

The interface is ugly and outdated, but the use is so simple that maybe not the focus of development team. The information architecture and content at the dashboard page is the biggest problem, a simple redesign could do miracles.

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.

A Good Way to Get an Overview of Where your Time is Going

I keep it running in the background and it seems to work well for me. I'll continue to use it. When it has benefit to me, it's quite a help. When it doesn't, I just don't pay attention to it.

Pros

It's easy to set up and use and pretty much works on its own. Using RescueTime, you can see how much time is spent on your computer and what types of things you are doing. It also comes in handy to be able to back-track and see what you were working on when you've been lax on your time-tracking duties. It helps to retro-actively fill in timesheets.

Cons

Some of the categorization out of the box doesn't always match up to your reality; for example, it may track a task as being unproductive when, in fact, it was a productive task for you. So things that it reports need to be either reviewed or taken with a grain of salt.

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.

Cannot recommend this enough.

This is the first thing I install in all my new machines and browsers, the information it provides is invaluable and really eye-opening, and really worth the low price-tag honestly. I really recommend this for anyone looking to improve their productivity.

Pros

The amount of information that this gathers is just mindblowing, being available on everything is just awesome. The automatic categorization for apps works most of the time. Then there are the vast amount of integrations it offers. This is the best time tracking software I have used, which just gets better with time.

Cons

Re-categorizing activities is somewhat convoluted, I've had to bookmark the page honestly so I can get to it quickly. The focus sessions are a neat feature but it needs to be more robust as it is quite easy to circumvent.

Only tool that met my needs (using Linux background daemon)

Great. I've looked into all of its functionalities, including measuring how much time you spend on various websites, but I only use one very basic feature: finding out how much time I spend working per day! I added the background process for Linux Ubuntu as a startup process and the tool stays completely hidden during use (the daemon doesn't even show in the notification area). I use Zapier to push the daily hour count to a Gsheet and then email that to myself as a daily report.

Pros

After evaluating all possible time trackers for Ubuntu, RescueTime was the only product I found which would give me a simple metric which is part of my KPIs — how much time am I spending at my workstation every day during weekdays? The tool does a lot more than that, but I capture this metric and email it to myself daily thanks to a Zapier hook.

Cons

The Ubuntu GUI doesn't really exist if I remember correctly. Would be nice to have the option, although even if I did, I probably wouldn't use it.

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 Best Productivity Tracker

RescueTime is a great tool and a very necessary one to automatically measure and monitor how and what you spend your time on

Pros

RescueTime is a very straightforward and easy to use time tracker as you just download the time tracking app onto your laptop or android device and it does the rest. It fits in well with our current requirement as it silently and automatically records time spent on each application in the background. The feature that we enjoyed the most is the fact that you get to see a complete picture of your productive and non productive time, this is all categorised automatically and it is very accurate. In addition, you get a dashboard online for you to visualise your activity. It greatly helped us to improve how we spent our time.

Cons

As an improvement, a feature that might be required is one to categorise certain activities viewed as non productive as productive. Additionally, support to integrate the logged hours with a billing tool will be very handy

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.