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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

RescueTime is an absolutely brilliant time tracking tool. It has given me a very simple but accurate tool for tracking exactly how much time I spend on projects. It's brilliant because it tracks time by app but also by websites visited. So I can include research time and reading time into the time I spend on projects. It tracks multiple devices which is great because I tend to switch between devices when working on projects. It's non intrusive and runs completely silently in the background with a simple weekly email and all data available via the mobile app.

It would be great to set up project and task tracking within the app so we can group our activities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Definitely worth it.

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.

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.

RescueTime brings insights into how you use your time, whether it's in a productive way or not. Can shed light on just how much time you spend on your computer.

Automatic tracking of how you use your time Easy to use dashboard Great way to stay accountable with your Goals

Lack of detail in reporting (RescueTime is not a replacement for time tracking for contractors) Always on nature of recording can pose a privacy risk

I've been a Rescuetime user for years and don't see myself stopping anytime soon.

Each week I take the report and show it to my accountability group, with the goal of decreasing my computer time week by week. Rescuetime makes it very easy to track and spot trends.

No cons that I can think of. Once I had categorized all of my different applications and activities it works well.

* Great easy to setup tool to track all activities done in system. * Extremely accurate regarding the activities and time usage. * Excellent reporting to generate and analyze the pattern. * Can be used to track Employee productivity. * Not a privacy nightmare as many sensitive data is not captured. * Can be used to track our computer usage and help us to be more productive. * Supports mobile devices and linux,Mac as well.

*Bit expensive for premium version/organization plans.

This tool for our team has been an eye-opening tool for tracking and improving productivity. Its automatic time tracking feature helps users understand how they spend their time on the computer and mobile devices. We particularly like The detailed reports and activity breakdowns provide valuable data to identify time-wasting habits and increase focus. Goal-setting and notification features encourage users to stay on track towards their productivity goals.

It may take time to fully utilise the insights gained from the tool

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

I underestimated RescueTime for too long. Thanks to a great blog they have (many useful time management articles) I stumbled upon their productivity course. The quality of that course made me rethink using RescueTime on a daily basis. I recommend it to every busy professional.

The most powerful feature of RescueTime is tracking on what activities you spend your time and when you do this. The power comes especially from being on every device you use.

I would like to see more features inside the mobile app. Especially regarding easily logging offline time.

RescueTime helps me to motivate myself and do more. I can experiment with lifestyle changes and see how they impact my productivity.

Detailed stats Focus mode API integrations Support for all relevant platforms

Can be a bit slow when trying to view monthly or yearly stats Lacks a single-page view for all the activities on a given day - only by category

A good tool to breakdown and understand your time online and offline on the devices, a great tool to have if you want to be more productive and healthier as well.

Rescue TIme is a great tool for those concerned on how are they spending their time online. Rescue Time lets you record precisely how much time you spent and where, giving you a real (often shocking) insight on what you were doing. This not only concerns people that wants to be more productive but also people that want to stay away from using too much their phones. In general RescueTime is simple and their free version does well for my needs. Rescue Time is simple to use, you don't have to do anything, just pretend nobody is watching and check your reports to see what's going on.

Their GUI could use some improving, the overall design of the websites are apps is a bit outdated and for such a popular service I would expect a better design. Maybe it's on the way. Generally speaking I am happy with Rescue Time and I don't see major issues using it.

Helps you to understand where your time flows.

It really helps to see on what one spend one's day - without much fuss, as it just work in background. To get a really thorough analysis, get the premium version and

To get clear picture you have paradoxically invest your time categorizing various activities. Plus it tends to underestimate your hard work in certain tasks - for example if you are doing research and have to google a lot.

ability to see how focused i am from day to day.

seamlessly integrates with all browsers. the same account can run on multiple machines. the default setup is pretty accurate and easy to customize to your productivity tendencies.

viewing trends over multiple years can be slow. Id love the ability to generate a lifetime report for view later.

Useful resource for seeing what online tasks consume our days. Nonintrusive, but monitors what windows and sites are open and consuming our time throughout the day. Very customizable --even on the free plans.

Initially, putting your tasks into categories (productive, not productive, etc) as well as attaching meaning to your tasks (communication, news, work-related, personal, etc) can take a while, but it pays off in the end with more relevant reports at week's end.

Easy to set up and works in the background so you don't have to worry about it. It also adds data from your cell phone, which is critical to see how your time gets spent each day.

Really, none that I can think of. I have been using it for many years, it's a keeper.

- very automated, install and forget about it - easy to see how productive you are and set goals

- sometimes doesn't detect activity when it's happening, skewing results - sometimes not very good at identifying the nature of programs - privacy concerns

I am glad I installed it, though I am not checking it regularly. But it helped me understand how I spend my time and how to be more productive.

I am feeling that the time slips through my fingers and now I know where. This tool helped me monitor how I spend time -- how much time do I actually work and how much I am fooling around.

Maybe they should improve the categorization and introduce a daily wrap up notification.