Meeting integration options leaving me in the dark

I’m having issues and also not quite understanding how RescueTime tracks time… (this is re: the newer version of RescueTime)

I have no meeting integration: My company uses Exchange, not 365. I sign into my company’s server, not Microsoft’s, so it seems that there is no compatibility there (the docs are kind of confusing, in some places they say just “365” and in others “365 OR Exchange”, which implies compatibility with multiple services).

I try to enter meetings manually as “Offline work”, but it is unclear to me what RescueTime is doing in the meantime as there is nowhere to indicate WHEN the meeting is happening, only how long. I assume this time does not contribute to my focus time total.

And how do auto-focus sessions work without meeting data? I would think that it would create focus sessions while I’m in meetings, since it doesn’t know about the time of the meetings!

I’d be happy to manually enter meeting times & durations at the start of the day if there were an interface to do that.

So, overall: any recommendations for how I should configure my settings if I have no meeting functionality? I feel like this is a huge gap in the documentation…

Thanks for any help you can give me :slight_smile:

Hi @michael_hairston! Great questions!

Yes, you’re right. RescueTime is not compatible with Microsoft Exchange. Sorry for the confusion here. I’m not sure where in the help doc you saw the word “exchange.” Please let me know and I’ll be sure to update the doc.

Right now you can only connect 1 Google Calendar and 1 Microsoft 365/Outlook Calendar to RescueTime. Once connected so long as you have one other meeting attendee or use the #meeting in your calendar event, RescueTime will recognize the event as scheduled meetings.

RescueTime will also recognize video chat/meeting apps, such as Zoom, Google Meet, etc, as meetings. That will end up in the unscheduled meetings category on your Meetings Report. This is a way to get RescueTime to recognize your meeting time since it can’t recognize your Microsoft Exchange as a meeting. You don’t have to have a connected calendar in order for RescueTime to track your meeting app. However, you will need to connect your calendar if you want RescueTime to not track your other computer activities (ie surfing the web while on a Zoom call) during your meeting call.

Since RescueTime can’t recognize your meetings as meetings, it’ll treat this time that you’re in as work mode. During work mode, RescueTime tracks and reports all of your computer activities. Your Focus Work during this time will count toward your Focus Work goal.

Right, because RescueTime can’t recognize your meetings, it may start a Focus Session during your meeting.

“I’d be happy to manually enter meeting times & durations at the start of the day if there were an interface to do that.” - this would make a great feature request. If you get a chance could you please add it here.

I hope this clears some things up. If not, you know where to find us :grinning:

I added the feature request.

As for seeing “Exchange” in the docs, I checked and I think it was just that I saw " Ready to give your Office 365 or Outlook Calendar a boost? [Click here]", which I took the “OR” to mean two different options (I don’t have Office365 at work, but I do have Outlook).

Any chance of increasing that number? I have both work and personal Google Calendars.

Hi @mark_gardner, for now we don’t have plans to extend this number. However, try this.