RescueTime Timesheets Overview

What is RescueTime Timesheets?

RescueTime Timesheets is a project tracking tool that makes filling out timesheets fast and accurate. Instead of manually entering hours for each client or project, Timesheets uses RescueTime data to do the work for you.

While RescueTime runs on your computer, it records your work activity—the apps and websites you use. Timesheets applies this data to the projects you’ve set up, so you can quickly generate a daily timesheet without guesswork.

Timesheets Timeline

When you open Timesheets, you’ll land on the timeline view. This is a visual record of your day, showing the highlights of what you worked on. Highlights are drawn from your RescueTime activity (apps and websites you used most), your connected calendars (meetings and Focus Sessions), integrations (e.g., task updates from project tools), and any focus tasks you set.

The timeline gives you context for your day, and RescueTime helps by suggesting which projects it thinks you were working on during different times. You can accept or adjust these suggestions as needed. Over time, RescueTime learns from your edits to improve future project matches.

You also have full control to add or edit time manually with a simple drag-and-drop interface. To keep the focus on meaningful work, the timeline only displays activities categorized as Focus Work, Other Work, or Neutral—activities designated as Personal or Distracting are filtered out.

Creating Projects

Before you can track your time, you’ll need to create the projects you want to work on. Select New Project and fill in the details:

Client and tasks: Assign the project to an existing client or create a new one. You can also link tasks or create new ones directly from this view.
Hints for automatic suggestions: Add unique identifiers (like file names or websites) that are exclusive to the project. These help RescueTime assign time more accurately. You can add multiple hints, but they’re optional, and suggestions will still work without them.
Billable settings: Mark the project as billable, and if so, set the rate and currency. Otherwise, toggle billable off.
Targets: Optionally, set a goal for how many hours you want to spend on the project, along with a start and end date.
Color: Pick a project color to make your timesheets easier to scan.

Clients and Tasks

Clients and tasks each have their own management pages, where you can create new entries, edit them, or archive them. Adding clients is optional, but when used, your projects will be separated on the timeline under each client.

From the Clients or Tasks pages, you can:

Create new entries using the +New button.
Import multiple entries at once with the Import button (the Import modal provides detailed instructions).
Clone an existing entry to quickly create a copy.
Archive entries you no longer need. Archived items can be restored at any time by selecting the Archive button and choosing which ones to bring back.

Project Suggestions

RescueTime automatically generates suggested time blocks on your timeline based on your history and AI analysis. These suggestions indicate which projects RescueTime thinks you were working on at different times of the day.

You can review these suggestions directly on your timeline, where they are marked with Review. From here, you can either accept them as-is or adjust them as needed.

To approve all suggestions for the day, click the check mark icon at the top of the page.
To see all past suggestions, hover over the checklist icon and select Review past suggestions. This opens a modal window showing all unreviewed or unaccepted suggestions.

Suggestions remain pending until you accept or reject them, giving you full control over what gets added to your project timeline.

Timesheets Reports

Your timesheet reports give you the flexibility to dig into your data and share it in the format you need. Under the Timesheets dropdown, you’ll find Personal Reports, with two options: View and export, and Calendar.

View and export

Here you can filter your data by date range, client, project, or task. You’ll also be able to choose how billable time is rounded, and whether you want to include all tracked time or just reviewed time. Once you’ve set your filters, you can export your report as an Excel or CSV file.

Need everything, no filters applied? Click the Raw button to export all unfiltered data for your selected date range.

To set your date range, open the date picker and click the start date on the calendar, then click the end date.

Calendar

The calendar view shows your week at a glance. Each day is broken into blocks that display how much time you spent on each project, giving you a clear high-level overview of where your time went.

Archiving Projects

Once a project is completed, remove it from your active projects by clicking on the three dots next to the project name and choosing Archive project.

Project archives are found on the Projects page by clicking the Project Archive button. On the Projects page, you can also create new projects, import projects in bulk (the same process as importing clients or tasks), and clone or edit projects.

Note: Projects, tasks, or clients may be deleted from the archive only if there is no project time attached to them.