Managing Alerts
RescueTime Alerts, a Premium-only feature, gives you the ability to have on-screen notifications presented to you for specific productivity benchmarks that you determine. For example, you can have a pop-up message alert you when you have spent more than one hour of distracting time or more than four hours spent on productive time. The Alerts feature is often used in conjunction with RescueTime Goals but does not need to be.
To access the Alerts page by clicking on Goals & Alerts on the top navigation > Alerts & Notifications tab.
To create a new alert, click the Create a new alert button which will open the alert editing interface. You set the parameters for the alert and select the alert to be for more or less than a specified period of time. Time is entered in hours and minutes.
There is a category drop-down box used to select the category of activity for the alert. It is what determines progress in the time measured for an alert - all activities matching that categorization will be tracked cumulatively as a measure of progress. In this example "All Productive Time" is chosen.
The When box selection will set the time period when the alert is in effect. You can use this to make time-specific alerts and create custom alert schedules using Advanced Filters. By checking the Notifications checkboxes you can turn on alert progress notifications via email or desktop and mobile.
Click on the Alert actions link to display advanced features.
- You can customize the message that shows as the alert content through add a custom message, and use an alert to start a FocusTime session.
- From Block distracting sites when triggered? drop-down box select the desired length of the FocusTime session.
- You can set a webpage to open in your browser at the time of the alert. As an example, have it set after each hour of productive time to open the Highlights page, so you are reminded to keep a record of what you have been doing.
You can link alerts to many other services via our integration partners.
Windows Users: Please note that RescueTime's pop-up notifications are not generated by the RescueTime application but originate from the Windows notification system. As such, please ensure that the following Windows settings are enabled on your system, to allow RescueTime's pop-up notifications for Goals and Alerts to be displayed:
