RescueTime Erfahrungen

The only time management app that helps me take control of my time

Kommentare: 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.​

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

Slightly underwhelming

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Good automatic tracking capacity.

Kommentare: I use the reports to adjust my work habits, making sure I spend most of my time on high-value activities, such as software design and development, work-life balance: RescueTime helps me maintain a healthy work balance and rest, which is crucial to avoid burnout. I establish limits regarding work time and make sure to reserve time for breaks and personal activities, simply fantastic except for what was previously mentioned such as more information about the data collected by your company.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

Although I understand the need for monitoring to improve productivity, I am sometimes concerned about privacy and how the collected data is handled, especially when it comes to sensitive information related to my work at [sensitive content hidden], I think I am missing or the team is missing more data About this, further learning, this program does not have the guidelines as clear as other similar software.

Frictionaless Time Tracking

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

Productivity Tracker for Remote workers

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

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

Consistently great, but dangerous for managers

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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.

My favorite solution for seeing where time is spent

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

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Identify & highlight distractions

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

The stats will surprise you

Kommentare: Definitely worth it.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

The best time-tracking tool. Period.

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Track your productivity (or unproductivity) with email reports

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

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

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

The Best Productivity Tracker

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

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

Great for managing your time

Kommentare: Great way of making sure you're not exceeding your daily quota of distracting/non-productive apps.

Vorteile:

RescueTime is quite complete. I like it that it also analyses the websites you use, not just the apps, and also allows you to get all information as one, that is, from your phone, personal computer and work laptop, and so on.

Nachteile:

Managing the categories is sometimes a bit of a hassle. Sometimes you access YouTube for a legit reason during work, and sometimes you don't. And it works in a way that you just determine if a site is more or less distracting, regardless of the time.

RescueTime is a Very useful Online Time Management Tool

Kommentare: I love this tool and will continue to use it.

Vorteile:

RescueTime is a great tool when it comes to keeping track of your precious time online. It monitors each and every website you visit and the apps you use. And most importantly it tracks how much time you spend on each of them. It automatically categorizes most of the apps and sites you use on a productive or destructive level. You can always map various sites according to your requirements. It gives very detailed stats weekly and shows exactly how you spend your time online. It also helps you to set weekly productivity goals and reduce unproductive time spend. It seamlessly works in the background and tracks time on your PC and Mobile. RescueTime free version is enough for most of the user.

Nachteile:

A real-time notification would be helpful. RescueTime pro version is a little costly.

Great way to make sure you stay on task

Vorteile:

Just works away in the background no intrusive at all rescue time just tracks what you are spending your time on day by day then sends you a report of how productive you have been. It's nice to have targets to aim at for your productivity and interesting to see actually how you spend the time on your laptop , with the reports this is pretty easy.

Nachteile:

Sometimes it is easy to forget it there (which is good and bad) and therefore not stop procrastinating until its to late.

Great for finding "time leaks" in productivity

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

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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.

Fairly customizable even on the free plan

Vorteile:

Seamlessly tracks my time and send me a weekly update to give me an idea of where I'm spending my time

Nachteile:

While you can generally customize the way different websites/programs are categorized, there isn't a way to do onetime categorization. Which means there isn't a way to differentiate between when you're, for instance, in Facebook for work (productive) versus scrolling endlessly through your timeline (distracting)

Runs smoothly in the background

Vorteile:

I appreciate that this is one of those "set it and forget it" programs. I forget that it's there and appreciate getting a weekly update that's clear and easy to read.

Nachteile:

It's not 100% accurate in how it categorizes things, but it's pretty close. I would just note that it's easy to forget that sometimes when you're on calls/in meetings, the software has no way of knowing. It's just a good rough estimate, but wouldn't recommend tying specific goals to it.

Great for small business owners & entrepreneurs

Vorteile:

Love using RescueTime to quantify my computer usage. Gives me great metrics for productivity and works seamlessly in the background.

Nachteile:

Not much to not like, it does what it says it does. Would like more tools to improve productivity during the day as RescueTime is so invisible you forget its running.

No more asking where your spend your time

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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.

Find where you're leaking time

Kommentare: I've used RescueTime to find out why I wasn't getting a lot of work done after work. After I've used it for about a week, the results were clear: YouTube was taking over hours and hours of my time. I started using it less and focused more on my writing, which gave me more pleasure anyway.

Vorteile:

Once you set this up, it's so easy to forget about it. Few pieces of software actually encourage you to NOT use it. I really appreciated this. Only browser extension and another small installer for your operating system means you're ready to monitor your time very fast.

Nachteile:

There aren't a lot of features to talk about. So it's hard to even call this a con. But perhaps other pieces of software that do similar things have more things to use. I would've like to be able to more specifically fine tune hours of operation, the software or websites it should monitor. Reports aren't amazing - at least in the free version. Overall it feels very barebones in the features department.

One of the best in the market

Vorteile:

It's usage tracking abilities across multiple devices is definitely its killer feature

Nachteile:

Its API capabilities are very limited and new features seem to make the product worse rather than better