Timesheets Overview

Timesheets is a project-based time tracking tool that builds your timesheet from your automatically logged computer activity.

This article explains how Timesheets works: the timeline, project suggestions, and what you can do with your data once it's reviewed and logged.

How Timesheets Works

What is Timesheets?

Timesheets uses RescueTime's automatic activity tracking to make filling out timesheets fast and accurate. Instead of manually logging hours, Timesheets uses your RescueTime activity data to suggest where your time went. As you review and confirm those suggestions, your timesheet builds itself with minimal effort.

The core workflow is:

1. RescueTime tracks your activity automatically in the background
2. Timesheets uses that activity to generate suggested project time blocks on your timeline
3. You review those suggestions, accepting, adjusting, or removing them
4. Confirmed time becomes your timesheet data, available in reports

The timeline

When you open Timesheets, you land on the timeline. This is a visual representation of your day, showing what you worked on and when. It's where you review suggestions and build your timesheet.

What shows up on the timeline

The timeline pulls from several sources:

• App and website activity: Your tracked data, captured automatically by RescueTime
• Calendar events: meetings imported from your connected calendar
• Integrations: activity from connected tools, such as task updates or commits
• Focus Session and Timer tasks: time blocks you've created by using Focus Sessions or the Timer

What's filtered out

To keep the timeline focused on work, only Focus Work, Other Work, and Neutral activities appear. Personal and Distracting activities are filtered out and won't be suggested as project time. Open the Activities page from the top navigation bar to adjust these designations.

Manual editing

When you begin using Timesheets, manually add time blocks anywhere on the timeline and adjust them as needed.

Offline activity

Hover over the checklist icon and choose "Add offline activity" to add in-person meetings, phone calls, and other offline work to your timeline.

Project suggestions

RescueTime automatically generates suggested time blocks based on your activity and past behavior. These autocompletions appear on your timeline marked as Review. Until you act on them, they're suggestions only.

What you can do with a suggestion

• Accept it as-is: confirms the suggestion and logs the time to that project
• Adjust it: change the project, task, duration, or notes before confirming
• Delete it: removes the suggestion

Reviewing your full day quickly

When you want to approve everything at once:

• Use the checkmark at the top of the page to approve all suggestions for the current day in one click
• Hover over the checklist icon to see all the days you haven't reviewed yet, so you don't fall behind without noticing

Your Project Structure

Projects

Projects are the foundation of Timesheets. Before you can log any time, you need to create at least one project. You can create as many projects as you need for your workflow.

Creating a project

Go to Timesheets → My Timeline and click + New Project. When setting up a project, you'll fill in:

Clients and tasks

Clients and tasks give your projects structure and make reports more useful.

Clients

Clients group related projects together for billing and reporting purposes. If you don't bill clients or don't need that information in your reports, you can skip them entirely. If you do use them, assigning a project to a client means that project's time rolls up under that client in reports and invoices.

Tasks

Tasks represent the type of work being done within a project, for example, Development, QA, or Account Management. They add a second layer of granularity beyond the project itself, so you can see not just how much time went into a project, but what kind of work was involved.

Managing clients and tasks

Both have dedicated pages under the Timesheets menu. From either page, you can:

• Create new entries
• Import entries in bulk
• Clone existing entries
• Archive items you no longer need (archived entries can be restored at any time)

Reports and History

Timesheets reports

Once you've added time to your projects, you can analyze and export that data from Timesheets → Personal Reports.

Filtering your report

Use filters to narrow down the data you want to see:

• Date range
• Client
• Project
• Task

Report options

• Choose how billable time is rounded
• Include all tracked time or only reviewed time
• Export as Excel or CSV
• Use Raw Export if you need all project data without filters applied

Calendar view

The calendar view shows your entire week of project time. Each day is broken into sections by project, giving you a high-level summary of how your time was distributed. This is useful for quickly spotting gaps or days you haven't reviewed yet before running a report.

Archiving projects

When a project is complete, archive it to remove it from your active list without losing any of its logged time history. Archiving keeps your projects panel clean while preserving your data.

To archive a project

1. Click the three-dot menu next to the project
2. Select Archive project

To view or restore archived projects

1. Go to Timesheets → Projects
2. Select Project Archive
3. From there, you can restore, edit, or manage archived projects