Premium User: Start Here 👉RescueTime 101

Welcome to RescueTime!

Here's a step by step guide to help you get set up.

⓵ Setup RescueTime: Once you have downloaded RescueTime, install it and make sure you see the RescueTime icon in the system tray or menu bar on Mac:

Spend one day working on your computer and going about your normal day to day tasks. Then finish the remaining steps below on Day 2.

⓶ Work Hours: Work hours help you track what you're doing at work and let you filter your reports to show the most important parts of your day. Customizing your work schedule allows you to gain insight into your habits, and will show you things like whether you're most productive in the mornings or the afternoons. Learn how to set up your work hours here.

⓷ Manage Categories: Decide what you would like your categories listed as here. Need help? Check out Changing Categories and Productivity scores

⓸ Assign Productivity & Categories: After visiting several websites you can assign the productivity score and the categories to your activities here. 

⓹  Goals: Goals help you change the way you spend your time. Choose a category or productivity level where you’d like to see improvement, and we will help you keep track of your efforts. You can create new goals here. Once created, you can see your goal progress on the dashboard, goals report, and in your weekly summary emails.

⓺ Alerts: Alerts can notify you when you have reached a certain threshold on an activity. You can receive desktop and/or email notifications alerting you when you've the point that you've assigned. You can set this to alert you when you have spent too much time on a particular site, or when you have reached a point where you need to stop for the day. You can create a new alert here. If you need help creating one, check out "How to create an alert".

⓻ FocusTime: One of our most popular features is FocusTime. FocusTime is used by writers, software developers, bookkeepers and anyone else who benefits from long blocks of uninterrupted focus. Simply decide on a time period to get focused and let RescueTime keep distractions away while you work. RescueTime will take the websites that you've marked as "very distracting" here and use that as your block list.  Take some time to determine which sites you consider productive or distracting. This will be unique to you and your type of work. The more work you categorize, the smarter the list gets.

Once that's complete, set up a FocusTime session. FocusTime can be enabled manually, or you can automate it by setting specific times to focus using a RescueTime alert. 

⓼ Offline Time:  People who spend a lot of time in meetings, on phone calls or have tasks that take them away from the computer will benefit from logging offline time. You can manually log time in meetings, phone calls and even your morning commute. Or you can change your settings here so that RescueTime prompts you to add information about what you did with your time away from the computer. All of this time can be categorized and ranked, just like your online activities, so your daily summaries are more comprehensive.

⓽ Highlights: RescueTime makes it easy to keep a record of the work you're doing. You can set up intelligent prompts to enter highlights at appropriate times, or by automatically logging directly from the other systems you use with our integrations. Status reporting has never been easier! It feels great to look back and see what you've completed, and you will never again get caught flat-footed when your boss asks you what you’ve been working on.

We know this is a lot to take in, but customization options are some of the things that make RescueTime so unique. Take your time, and as you add more information and change settings to suit your needs, RescueTime will get better and better at showing you where you're most productive and where you can improve. In just a couple of weeks you will have a wealth of information about your habits which you can use to meet (and surpass) your goals!