If you want to become your most productive self, you need to understand how you spend your time. There’s no better tool for doing that than RescueTime. This service, which works mostly behind the scenes, has been one of our favorite productivity apps for years. It gives you insight into where the minutes and hours of the day go while you’re on your computer or mobile device. A free version is more than sufficient for most people, while a somewhat pricey Premium version provides more in-depth analysis. RescueTime continues to impress us after many years of use. It’s a wonderful tool for the modern workplace and an Editors’ Choice winner.
RescueTime is not a time-tracking tool for freelancers and other people who bill by the hour. Nor is it employee monitoring software. Rather, it’s a personal tool that gives you insight into how you use your time on your devices without you having to start and stop timers or do anything at all.
How Does RescueTime Work?
RescueTime is an app you install on your computer and mobile devices that automatically pays attention to the apps you use, which files you open, and what websites you visit. It logs how much time you spend in each of them. There are options for turning it on and off, as well as setting it to automatically run only during the days and hours you want. It has a pause button preset for 15 minutes and one hour, which makes it easy to disable during breaks.
As RescueTime collects data about how you spend your time on your devices, it categorizes the time and labels it as productive or distracting on a five-step scale. For example, time spent using Microsoft Word might be categorized as business or writing and labeled highly productive. Time spent on The New York Times website could be productive or distracting, depending on your work and how you use that site, so you get to choose how to classify it. If you don’t bother to categorize anything, RescueTime makes guesses for you.
Privacy may be the top concern of people who are new to RescueTime. We tackle that question in depth toward the end of this article. In short, only you see your data, even if you are part of a Team account; you always have the option to disable RescueTime or not have it track you during certain days and hours; and you can tell RescueTime to not track certain apps and sites for anything you don’t want it to record.
Once you’ve used RescueTime for a bit, the app generates reports with insights on how you spend your time over time. For example, it might show that in a given day you spent 50% of your time doing work categorized as Design & Composition, 23% on Communication & Scheduling, 7% on Social Networking, and so forth. A monthly or yearly report might show that you tend to be most productive on Tuesdays and least productive on Friday afternoons. Or you might recognize that you burn yourself out and become unproductive on days when you don’t take adequate breaks or stop working at a reasonable hour. Seeing these patterns and habits gives you the chance to conscientiously work to improve them.
RescueTime Pricing and Plans
RescueTime offers two tiers of service for personal use: Lite (free) and Premium ($9 per month or $78 per year). The free version is more than adequate for first-time users, and we recommend using a free account for at least a month before deciding to upgrade. We’ll cover the differences between free and paid accounts later.
There’s now a team plan, too, if you want to roll out RescueTime across an organization or group. It starts at $6 per person per month. Teams can also sign up for additional time-management training for $99 per person.
Comparing RescueTime’s price to that of other apps requires an open mind because few apps do exactly what RescueTime does. Qbserve is one of the most similar apps available, and it charges a flat one-time fee of $29. It’s only available for macOS, however, whereas RescueTime works on Windows, Linux, Android, and mobile Apple devices, in addition to macOS. RescueTime also has browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.
More traditional time-tracking apps for freelancers (which let workers track billable hours) cost more, but typically include tools for generating invoices. Harvest ($12 per person per month for Premium) is a decent example. Toggl Track is another. Its rates for a premium version have gone up considerably in the last few years and now start at $20 per person per month. Both Harvest and Toggl Track offer capable free versions, too.
Free vs. Paid
Free Lite members get all of RescueTime’s core functionality. They can install RescueTime anywhere it works and have it track how much time they spend using every website and app. RescueTime Lite doesn’t track file names, however. Lite members get all the tools for categorizing the apps and sites they use as productive or unproductive, and they can set goals such as spend X hours per week on productive tasks and fewer than Y hours on unproductive stuff. Free members can also opt to receive a weekly email report. Perhaps the most important limitation of a free account is that you can only view your stats going back two weeks, whereas paying members get unlimited data history. Previously, RescueTime gave away three months of data for free, so it has become more restrictive.
Paying subscribers get everything in the free plan, plus extra features and reports. For example, you can enable alerts for when you hit your goals, as well as customize your recorded offline time, like when you’re on a break or in a meeting. RescueTime automatically detects when your computer has been idle for a few minutes—and you choose how long that is—and then when you touch your computer again, RescueTime asks whether you were in a meeting, on a phone call, out to lunch, or something else. Paying members can customize those options, too, and add new ones. The value is in being able to accurately categorize all your working hours, not merely the time spent actively using your mouse and keyboard.
Another benefit for paying members is a FocusTime distraction blocker. When you enable it, RescueTime prevents you from opening distracting websites for a period of time you set.
If you’re interested in blocking distracting websites, you can get it from other free browser extensions, regardless of whether you use RescueTime. Strict Workflow is one example. This extension puts a little timer in your browser bar, and the idea is to work without distraction for whatever amount of time you set. During that focused work session, the extension prevents you from opening a list of distracting websites, and you get to choose what’s on that list. Once you complete a focused work session, you then take a timed break.
Scores and Reports
Reports and your so-called Productivity Pulse score bridge the gap between tracking your time and making sense of it. These reports are what make RescueTime valuable.
The reports are plentiful, with pie charts, bar graphs, line-item lists, and other visualizations. There are numerous ways to understand under which conditions you work best, when you tend to get distracted, and more.
One simple but effective piece of information RescueTime provides is an analysis of when you tend to be the most productive during the day. You can run this report for a single day or to show an average over a week, month, or year. How does this information benefit you? Let’s say you notice your productivity tends to be highest from 9-11 a.m. and again from 2-4 p.m. You could start using a time-management technique, such as time-blocking, to plan your most important tasks for those highly productive windows. Save meetings, email, and other work that requires less focus for the other hours of the day.
The longer you use RescueTime Premium, the more data you have, and the more useful that data becomes through the reports.
The other key metric is called a Productivity Pulse score. It’s a daily score, shown as a percent, based on the percent of time spent on very productive, productive, neutral, distracting, and very distracting activities. To be clear, no one is advocating for a 100% Productivity Pulse score. This score is more of a baseline for comparing one day to another. A RescueTime blog post notes that the average score is 67% percent and the in-house average at the company is 79%.
One minor complaint is that it’s difficult to discover and configure every aspect of RescureTime’s reports and data collection options. Generating the exact graph you want may take some trial-and-error clicking, and the same goes for customizing your account. It would be nice to create a custom dashboard, for example, with a few of your favorite reports.
Mobile Apps
The RescueTime mobile apps serve two primary functions. One is to let you track your phone usage, which doesn’t work well. The other is to view data collected from the desktop app, and that part works fine. The mobile app can also alert you when you’re creeping up on a goal (“You’ve spent 54 minutes on distracting tasks today!”). The desktop app does that, too.
The Android app and iPhone app are a little different. Neither is a work of art. The iPhone app requires that you: 1) enable GPS, 2) allow the app to access your location, and 3) allow notifications. If you don’t, the app won’t track your phone usage at all. The location requirement feels excessive and unnecessary. The Android app requires that you grant access to track apps.
While testing the app, neither one worked as expected. On Android, it tracked total screen time, but not the individual apps I used. On iPhone, it tracked the number of phone pickups and their location, but not the apps I used. You’re better off using Apple Screen Time if you want a detailed look at how long you use your iPhone each day and what you do on it. As for Android, we at PCMag don’t have an alternative recommendation for a time-tracking app at this time.
Privacy
When faced with RescueTime’s proposition—it tracks everything you do!—some people may justifiably worry about their privacy and the security of information. If you work with sensitive information online or store sensitive information on your computers and mobile devices, you’ll want to read RescueTime’s privacy and security statements closely.
For everyone else, the privacy policy alone is not that long. There are a few important notes off to the right side of the page, namely stating the company complies with GDPR in the EU and DPA in the UK. There are links to the pages where you can configure the information RescueTime collects from you as well as where to go if you want to download your data or permanently delete your account. Account deletion is a self-service affair, so it’s easy and quick to do.
You can grant other apps and services access to your RescueTime data if you want to set up integrations. It works with IFTTT, Slack, Microsoft Office, and Google Calendar, among other apps. If you have the know-how, you can download your RescueTime data as a .CSV file and do anything you like with it, such as compare it with data from a fitness tracker or health device and look for patterns.
Rescuing Your Time
Much of the value you get from RescueTime comes from what you make of the data and how you use that information to influence your own behavior. Changing behavior is hard, but getting rich insights doesn’t have to be.
RescueTime is an outstanding tool for anyone who wants to understand how they spend time on their devices. Whether you want to actively change your behaviors or merely want insight into your work habits and time-management skills, start with this tool. RescueTime is a rare five-star product and one of the best productivity tools we’ve ever tested.
