This Review Covers:
- Overview
- What Do Users Like About RescueTime?
- What Don’t Users Like About RescueTime?
- What Pricing Plans Does RescueTime Offer?
- What are the Standout Features of RescueTime?
- Selected Positive User Feedback
- Selected Negative User Feedback
- What are RescueTime’s Review Ratings from Review Sites?
- What’s My Final Verdict on RescueTime?
Overview
RescueTime is an award-winning software marketed as a productivity assistant that records computer and device usage habits. It touts time tracking combined with intuitive analysis of activities that don’t require any manual input from users.
RescueTime automatically tracks time and activities from a user’s device. The data gathered by the software is organized into reports that detail how the time has been used on sites visited, files opened, and the apps and programs used the entire day.
My favorite feature is called FocusTime, which blocks all the websites classified by the user as personal or distracting, guarding your digital workspace from social media, entertainment, and other things that might creep up unnoticed, stealing time away from the things that matter.
While the software does work well as a time tracking and activity analysis software, it lacks some very important features commonly present in other software marketed as productivity assistants.
RescueTime does not offer workforce management tools such as cost calculation, invoicing, geolocation, and other features that limit its use to mostly personal goal-chasing. While it is a valuable productivity enhancement tool, it is not a work management and productivity solution for freelancers and businesses who need more than just the analytics that RescueTime provides.
Aside from these limitations, RescueTime doesn’t do quite well on mobile. Users have encountered bugs that have led to loss of tracked data, or the app simply doesn’t work and data doesn’t get tracked.
What Do Users Like About RescueTime?
- Automatic and unobtrusive tracking
- Excellent productivity analysis
- Great for reducing distractions
Find more on what users love about RescueTime.
What Don't Users Like about RescueTime?
- Mobile app needs some improvement
- UI needs improvements
- Privacy concerns
Find more on what users hate about RescueTime.
What Pricing Plans Does RescueTime Offer?
RescueTime has two plan variants: RescueTime Lite and RescueTime Premium.
Lite
RescueTime Lite is free and is intended to cover the basics of time management and analysis.
With this plan, users get a personalized daily Focus Work goal, real-time tracking of daily goals and access to yesterday’s results, weekly reports of activities, goals and distractions, and timely alerts to improve habits.
Premium
RescueTime Premium is a paid plan that costs $12 monthly or $78 annually.
With this plan, users get all RescueTime Lite features, plus Focus sessions to block distractions, calendar integrations to schedule Focus Sessions, one-click entry into meetings, meeting tracking, morning outlook with Focus Zone forecasting, history reports with date controls and spreadsheet export, and weekly and monthly progress tracking.
If we compare RescueTime Premium’s price to similar software with project management and other administration capabilities at similar price points, I can’t help but feel that they are charging so much for so little.
What are the Standout Features of RescueTime?
1. FocusTime
FocusTime blocks out websites that the user has pre-defined as Personal or Distractions for a duration of time set by the user. You can start a FocusTime session by selecting the Get Focused option from the desktop app, accessed by clicking on the RescueTime icon on the menu bar or system tray.
You can also start FocusTime through calendar events, where it will start automatically at the time the entry is set. Users can set up an automatic Focus Session, by having it automatically start when you have spent a user-set amount of time on personal activities.
During FocusTime when you go to a website you listed as Personal or a Distraction, you’ll be met with a FocusTime block page. You can choose to continue to the site, rescore it to Other Work, or continue to focus.
When a user enters into a Focus Session, all their devices connected to their RescueTime account will automatically be in focus session as well.
2. Comprehensive Activity Tracking
RescueTime automatically tracks all computer activity 12 to 24 hours after it is installed. It doesn’t require users to clock in or switch tasks on a dashboard every time something new is being started, except during Focus Sessions.
Working in the background, RescueTime records every website and application users open or use during user-determined periods of tracking. It can be configured to collect full window titles, document titles, and URLs for more transparent activity monitoring.
Users also have the option to specify which sites and programs should be tracked via a whitelist on the Monitoring Options page. This means that site-specific data from whitelisted sites are recorded as usual, but activities on non-whitelisted sites are recorded merely as general browsing.
The Goals feature encourages users to help improve their habits by analyzing tracked data and creating actionable plans from it. Focus Work Goals take into consideration their meeting schedules and personal information to create — and meet — realistic milestones.
3. Productivity Pulse
RescueTime’s Productivity Pulse is a productivity meter that calculates the score across a time period on a donut graph that displays productivity points out of a hundred a user accumulates according to their time usage.
The score is calculated as the time-weighted average of the five different categories of activities previously discussed, ranging from Focus Work Time to Distracting Time.
This feature provides an easily understandable representation of time utilization and is helpful when users need to quickly check their productivity score or to keep track of progress and set up scores to beat. Having a number to surpass is a cool way of motivating users to do better; RescueTime’s Productivity Pulse provides just the challenge to keep them on fire.
Selected Positive User Feedback:
- “Its the best app which helps me to set goals and also in time tracking. It has the feature of automatic time tracking which helps us to understand the hours we worked.” – Verified User in Accounting (Source G2)
- “One of the most useful aspects of RescueTime is its ability to automatically track the time I spend on different apps and websites without the need for manual intervention. This helps me get an accurate and objective picture of my work day without extra effort, the biggest time savings I have is with these features.” – Verified Reviewer (Source Capterra)
- “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..” – Fernando L. (Source Capterra)
- “The best thing about RescueTime is how after setup you simply forget about it. It works 100% without interaction and at the end of each day you have a comprehensive report on all the activities you performed.” – Lucas P. (Source Capterra)
- “The ease of use is the best of that tool. Without having to remember to start a task or something, it silently records what you are doing in the background.” – Christian H. (Source Capterra)
Selected Negative User Feedback:
- “Can’t use with 2fa, which is insane. RescueTime carries sensitive data that tracks everything I do, so I’m incredulous that they don’t provide the barest of protections for that data.” – T.D. Eastvold (Source Google Play)
- “The phone app looks very dated and needs a big UI upgrade, the web app is very nice and informative, I really wish the app could replicate what the web app can do.” – Dinerty (Source Google Play)
- “If it works, this app is great. But most of the time it’s busy freezing, crashing or simply not tracking any app activity. ” – Eric (Source Google Play)
- “Would like to see better integration between the mobile app and the Windows app, for example, focus times could force the same Android actions automagically. ” – Geoffrey T. (Source G2)
- “It collects all the data and sends storage to its server. I often worry about the data privacy issues with this software, Have to evaluate the tradeoff.” – Tom V. (Source G2)
What are RescueTime's Review Ratings from Review Sites?
(As of October 2024)
- Capterra: 4.6/5
- G2: 4.1/5
- Software Advice: 4.5/5
- TrustRadius: 7.9/10
- Google Play Store: 4.1/5
- App Store: 2.0/5
What's My Final Verdict on RescueTime?
RescueTime is a great time management and productivity-boosting tool that lives up to its name by helping users take back their time from unproductive practices and habits that they may not even know they have.
It holds up a clear and truthful mirror to users by faithfully logging all activities from the moment their work day begins to the moment it ends. The data gathered from tracking activities across periods are organized into user-defined categories that rank them on a five-point scale of productivity, from very productive to very distracting.
This allows users to reflect on their time utilization and adjust their practices as needed. Over time, RescueTime helps users build healthy productivity habits.Having said that, I would like to clarify that RescueTime is not a replacement for traditional project management tools, as it lacks many important features that other similar time tracking software provide for similar pricing.
It does not have any shift scheduling capabilities, billing and invoicing features, project progress tracking tools, and accountability safeguards, among others. And while it does provide very detailed analytics, too many numbers and report variants may just prove to be too much for users looking for simpler and to-the-point reporting.
Other issues that caught my attention are the usual bugs, glitches, and crashes, some very much-needed tweaking in the mobile apps to address less-than-desirable mobile experiences, and stronger assurances that users’ privacy would not be compromised by its all-encompassing activity tracking.
To sum it all up, I’d say that you should definitely get RescueTime if you want to really understand where your time goes, and want to become more productive and develop a healthier work-life balance but don’t know where to begin.
But if you are looking for a more capable and traditional time tracking and project management tool, look elsewhere as RescueTime is not that.
