RescueTime Timesheets

What you'll learn

What is RescueTime Timesheets?
About Timesheets Suggestions
Timeline Highlights
How RescueTime Timesheets works
Assigning Time
Archives

What is RescueTime Timesheets?

RescueTime Timesheets is a new project tracking feature from RescueTime. We heard from hundreds of users who spent hours each week dividing their time between projects or clients and filling out timesheets. There had to be a better way. Enter Timesheets, your project time tracker, to help you complete your timesheet with less fuss and hopefully more fun.

Timesheets is built on RescueTime—the most powerful and accurate time tracking software on the market. While RescueTime is running on your computer it logs your work activity, including the apps and websites you use. Timesheets then uses this data to add time to the projects you've created and help you accurately and quickly fill out a daily timesheet.

Please note—only activities scored or ranked as "Focus Work", "Other Work" and "Neutral" are displayed on your timeline. All activities scored or ranked as "Personal" and "Distracting" activities are omitted.

About Timesheets Suggestions

You have the option to enable History, History & AI (powered by OpenAI), Or Off. This can be enabled from your Timesheets Settings page.
Enabling History or History & AI will allow your activities to be assigned to projects automatically for your "Review" on your timeline.

These time blocks are automatically generated by History, or History & AI for you to review and approve or reject.

Choosing Off will require you to assign all activities to projects manually. No automation will take place. Choosing this option will automatically switch the Timesheet Completion Schedule to Off.

Timeline Highlights

On the Timesheets webpage, you'll see your timeline highlights—these include the documents and websites that were most important to what you were doing at that time. Other highlights are captured from your connected Google or Outlook calendar (i.e. scheduled meetings or scheduled Focus Sessions), updates made to your integration tasks (i.e. Asana, Trello, or GitHub), or the focus task you entered at the start of a Focus Session.

The timeline highlights give you a general context for what you were working on and then you set and confirm the boundaries.

The History and/or AI will offer suggestions for which projects it thinks you were working on at various points throughout the day. This allows you to easily review the suggestions and either accept them or adjust, as necessary.

In addition to the automated suggestions, the simple interface allows you to easily drag, drop, and slide projects on your timeline. You can see this in action below. Reviewing the suggestions on your timeline ensures an accurate and complete timesheet.

How RescueTime Timesheets Works

Here we'll walk you through how to add projects and label your time to help you get your timesheets in order.

Adding Projects, Clients and Tasks

When you first use Timesheets, you will need to enter the projects you wish to track. Click the New Project button and enter the below information.

You can Assign to Client or create a new client in this modal. You can assign Available Tasks or create a new task from the modal.

Enter AI Classification Hints that are unique to the project to help the AI assign your time and choose a color to help you differentiate the projects. Hints should be short entries like file names, partial file names, or websites exclusive to a project.

Note—the AI will still work without hints. However, the more information you provide, the better the tool will be at categorizing your projects.

Assigning Time

There are several ways to assign time to your projects.

History and/or AI Enabled

You'll see automated suggestions for "Review" on your timeline. You can accept all the suggestions for the day by clicking the check mark icon at the top of the page. Or you can review all suggestions by clicking the magnifying glass plus icon. This will bring up a modal displaying all your unreviewed/unaccepted suggestions.
Click on the date to review the automated suggestions in the timesheet for that day. Or click the "delete & finalize" link to remove the automated suggestions and "Finalize" the day.

You can accept (with a checkmark), delete, or edit each automated suggestion. When you see Review in a time block, this is a suggestion. Clicking on the block will bring up a modal providing a more granular view of your buckets of activity to assign to different projects. See the gif below showing an example of this.
- Check mark icon: Accept the automated suggestion
- Edit icon: Opens the project modal for you to edit the project
- Trash bin icon: Reject the automated suggestion
- Merge down: Sometimes you'll see this option when you have two blocks of the same project next to each other. This option will merge both blocks together.

Assign to task: If a task has been assigned to the project then you'll see this option at on the right hand side.
Notes: You can include notes to each project and this will display on your Timesheets Reports when you export the report.

You may find activities that don't belong in your timesheet. These are activities that you may have forgotten to score as "distracting" or "personal" so they found their way into your timesheet. You can easily remove these activities by clicking on Settings or the gear icon.This will bring up a list of your activities that you can simply toggle on and off to control what appears on your timeline.
Once you're done reviewing your timesheet for the day, you can "Finalize" it by clicking the unlock icon to lock in the day. No updates, manual or automated can be made once your timesheet is finalized. If you need to make changes to your timeline then you'll need to click the lock icon. This will display the unlock icon.

Manual Assignment

You can manually add project time to your timeline by dragging from the project names on the left side of the screen onto your timeline. Once placed on your timeline, you can drag the top and bottom edges of the project block to adjust its timeframe.

You can manually add project time to your timeline by clicking a section of the timeline and assigning it to your project. Click on a blank area with no project time and Select Project.
Or click on a project block to assign each five-minute bucket to its corresponding project. Be sure to click Save when you're finished.