Recent product history and hopes going forward 2025+

RescueTime General Topics
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The beginning of this year seems like a good time for a bit of a history review and a going-forward update on RescueTime’s product road map.

RescueTime became first known for its high-res stats on digital life, and for distraction management based on that data. Some users found the most value in time analysis and reporting, some in our focus tools (originally FocusTime, now Focus Sessions). We did lots of user interviews– interest was always pretty split, but we found that among our paying users, the focus tools stood as highlight feature for early conversion and retention.

Running a business like this profitably and giving our investors something to look forward to has always been a challenge, particularly since we don’t market our user data to others, anonymized or not. In our pursuit of a sustainable model, what was called publicly “new RescueTime” versus what we started to call “RescueTime Classic”, we attempted an informed reboot zeroing in on the focus aspect. We hoped to find our way into healthy digital life habits and wellness oriented work space by adding value all around the idea of focus sessions. The update brought brain clearing warmups, focus soundtracks and app blocking added to the existing site blocking, and focus zone prediction with an awareness of your calendar’s affect on your week.

Around the same time, Covid hit, pushing most people to work from home environments. We experienced an initial surge of growth, with the real business signals hard to separate out due to the unique business conditions. As time went on, we came to terms with the focus oriented app being something people might use episodically, or to solve an initial problem, but didn’t have the right feature set to hold users as longer term customers– and the product path to find the features that would do this was pretty complex, and not guaranteed. Inbound users had been sent to this version of the app.

Meanwhile, most historical users remained on the reporting rich version of the app. Users in both modes want capabilities available in the other, when some capabilities were segregated due to UX compatibility or “keep it simple” reasons. Ultimately, it seems the truth is as usual somewhere in between, as our initial research told us: some users are more analytics oriented, some more focus oriented, and some are exactly in the middle. People want the full feature set, but all the features needed to make sense and be coherent together.

So we have embarked on the path of unifying and rationalizing across all the features and design patterns that can come together to achieve that goal: a great focus tool that provides ongoing value by providing analysis and goal setting around historical time detail, and that can leverage that detail to deliver super accurate timesheets and forecasting, and expand from the individual to the team.

We learned a lot from our periods on both sides of that product building effort, and that it was possible to distill the best lessons of both into an evolved product. And this would be the platform for truly new features, that are orthogonal to but enriched by our foundation, Timesheets in this case.

Our resource limitations have meant that this evolution is gradual and includes some hiccups on the way, but the results are realized in many parts of the system, and end goals are in sight.

We want to:

  • Deliver the best focus tool on the market using our deep domain experience.
  • Provide invaluable analytics, insight, and foresight for your digital life.
  • Bring accuracy and automation to teams and individuals tracking projects and tasks.
  • And… next: provide teams and users collaboration and automation for planning out efforts in the time in front of them, instead of behind.

As we continue to advance RescueTime, your feedback from among our community of users is invaluable. Your real life experiences and insights inspire us to continue to innovate a tool that truly meets your needs. What new features or improvements to existing ones would you like to see that could make RescueTime more helpful in optimizing your digital life? Help us align our tools, advice and analysis to best match your workflow, productivity and life balance needs.

We also ask for your patience as our small team works diligently to bring this vision to life. Building a tool that successfully balances analytics and focus, while integrating new capabilities, is no small feat. With your input and support, we are confident in creating an unmatched solution.

Thank you for participating in our community, for sticking with us, and for sharing your experiences with us and your colleagues and friends. We’re excited about what the future holds and look forward to the challenges and adventures ahead with our community.

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Thanks for the update! I have feedback primarily on the existing features for RescueTime Classic and why I value them so much, and why I have not tried to switch to New RescueTime/RTX/RescueTime Assistant.

I’ve been a paying user since 2018, the year I started freelancing, and I keep coming back to RescueTime Classic because of its notification/alert customization and the judgement-free data consolidation that runs in the background. It doesn’t tell me what I should be doing; it simply logs what I’ve done. If it does notify me of anything, the wording can generally be customized to resonate more deeply with me and my goals.

I work from home remotely as an independent contractor (the Canada Revenue Agency way of saying I’m a self-employed freelancer), primarily doing asynchronous work with incredibly flexible deadlines. This experience isn’t typical in freelancing where deadlines and calls/meetings require scheduling and more time-sensitive work. I also have chronic illness, so my productivity levels are not predictable or aligned with common working hours like Monday-Friday, 9-to-5, or even weekly hours (regardless of if it’s 10 hours or 40 hours). These factor heavily into why I prefer RescueTime Classic and its existing features, even though I know it’s likely a minority experience.

I have not explored New RescueTime in more depth. Truthfully, I’m not sure I can at this point without making a new account or uninstalling all of the RescueTime Classic services. The New RescueTime also doesn’t appear to be available for Android, so I’d be losing out on all the insights for my core distracting and personal device.

From what I can tell in the Help articles, it’s a timer with notifications. Aside from the synchronization with the analytics, these types of “focus” apps are a dime a dozen, and they don’t actually help me focus unless they’re also blocking distractions. The “block distractions” capabilities on RescueTime Classic weren’t as granular as I liked and didn’t work well on my phone, so I got Freedom To premium to fit this need. With it, I can block websites and mobile apps on a schedule or in timed sessions, and it syncs across devices. If this were capable with RescueTime, then it would be a full-service app for me.

My productivity optimization for the future looks like fewer notifications and tools to adjust, not more. I have a timer on my desk. I have a distraction-blocking app that runs in the background. I have RescueTime collecting and organizing my digital activities; the Timesheet feature is one I intend to explore this year as I start a new side hustle. I have ambient music offline because browsing music online is another distraction. I can’t think of any gaps that need to be filled with more tools.

My biggest hope for 2025 onward is the Android mobile app. I visit the data analytics webpage frequently throughout the day, so having the information displayed in more detail on the mobile app would be helpful. The productivity score is valuable to me as well, especially the chart showing it changing throughout the day, which I’d love to see on the app. I would also like to have notifications on Android; for Classic, they’re still only via email and desktop. My phone is by far my biggest distraction, and it’s disappointing that the Android app doesn’t seem to be prioritized. It’s not listed on the Get RescueTime page and its last update in the Play Store was in 2023. The synchronization between mobile time and the server has also been increasingly buggy. If Android support for time tracking is discontinued, I will leave the service and find something else.

While pivoting to planning would work for teams who have more to coordinate, it’s not something I need. I’m not a planner. I’m a tracker. I do a brain dump or make a big to-do list, and then I pick and choose what to do based on how I’m feeling that day or hour and what needs to be prioritized for my contracts—or I just wake up and know I need to do certain things. Planning simply doesn’t work for me and my work because some things just take more time and others take less time. Analyzing and reflecting on the past—even if it’s only 2 hours—empowers me to align my choices with my goals over the next hour, time block, or day. The only thing I can think of where information on the future time would be helpful is something like a notification outlining recent trends (e.g., “Over the last 14 days, you’ve had more productive time between 12pm and 2pm”) so that I can be more mindful of habits. I’d appreciate something similar to the Dashboard views where it shows Goals trending upwards or trending downwards.

Planning out a Focus Session doesn’t align with my workflow because of my chronic illness, which affects my cognitive functioning: I won’t know how much focus I have in me until I get started, and once I start, I don’t know how long it will last. A notification telling me to take a break when I’m in a flow state is one of the worst distractions I could have.

I’m pretty averse to notifications telling me to do X or Y, which is why I turn off nearly every notification I can on desktop and mobile for every app. It’s also why I value the custom Alerts in RescueTime Classic so much. I customized the wording to be personally motivating to me, and I can’t see that as an option with the Help articles on the Assistant. (Somewhat related: the email notifications for the goals are not as helpful because I can’t customize the wording, so getting an email saying “Oops! You exceeded your time…” isn’t personally motivating.)

I don’t need a timer telling me to focus; there are thousands out there already. Instead, I need a tool that works in the background to collect data that I can rely on for reflecting, invoicing, and observing changes or trends. I love the reports and summaries. I love the charts and tables. I love the customization. I love that it presents the data without giving any emotional or judgemental messaging, whether it’s positive or negative, like “Wow, you worked hard today!” or “Drat, it looks like this wasn’t a very productive day.” I love that I can look at data over months or a year and bring the information to my health team to show them if my work is impacted, if I’m falling into known coping mechanisms that hint toward a flare or episode, and if I’m making improvements in my motivation and brain health.

RescueTime tracks every single thing I do on a digital device without telling me what to do with my time, and that’s what I find most valuable. It’s a silent observer that I can check in with and fine-tune to my personal needs. I think it has a lot of existing features that can be honed and enhanced to give users more insight into their habits, trends, goals, and productivity.

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Hi Coryl,

Thanks for your detailed and helpful response! From what I am understanding from your thoughts on what had been called our “new RescueTime”, I think I can say things have quickly evolved beyond what the earlier marketed indicated. We did make a targeted effort on a focus coaching concept, but came to terms with the fact that there are lots of users coming from your perspective as well, and that the focus coaching has a limited use horizon for many.

So, what we have tried to do is take the richer capabilities of the updated client (assistant) but combine those with the richness of classic reporting, and making settings for users to be able to bias their experience towards “stay out of my way” or “coach me please” (this is the passive vs active toggle in Focus settings, and the toggles you an also adjust under the Notifications settings).

We also “unified” goals and alerts so everybody has the tools to make whatever custom interventions they want basic on their activity.

With regard to Android, we do hope to be able to invest more in refreshing the app, however, it is a very difficult challenge. Google has been following Apple’s lead in making it harder and harder to (like, on Apple) contractually impossible to get app usage stats off the phone. So, settings aside app usage states, we would at least hope to get feature parity with the iOS app, which lets you use the device to manage focus sessions, have app blocking to avoid device distractions, and track projects.

To sum up, I’ll try to clarify this: there is no longer a New RescueTime to explore. We are giving all the features to everyone now, and gradually simplifying and consolidating the experience, while looking for new improvements.

I hope that information helps.

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Thanks for the detailed updates! I’m excited to see the new timesheet mode as that’s something I’ve been hoping for since I started using Rescuetime for measuring time spent on contractor work in 2015!
This may be out of scope/feasibility or it could spark a conversation about appealing to an entirely new audience. I’ve been doing more work in the analog world for past two to three years and I haven’t found a satisfactory solution for the kind of granular time tracking that Rescuetime offers in the digital. I started looking into voice-based time tracking and found telltali.com and am considering checking it out with a free trial for the month of March. Is there a possibility of capturing time segments in Rescuetime via voice assistant entries that would show up on the timesheet?

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Thank you for this great detail.
I’ve been an individual subscriber since 2013 after using the tool on my team at work for the two years prior.

Adding the timesheet functionality is perplexing, and I would like more training. I struggle with setting it up as not all of my activities are projects, and there aren’t other people’s examples to help me understand how it could be used. Think about it like the public Trello boards and templates. Could the timesheet tool have the ability to apply a template for “freelancer,” “consultant,” etc etc?

Thanks

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Hello Mark,

I appreciate from experience how difficult it is to find a market, and how hard it is to find yourself split between different markets. I’m in the time tracking market and don’t care about focus features. In fact, I really only use this screen: Sign in to RescueTime and the detail pages off of it. I’ve been a customer since 2012 so a very long time.

I don’t mean this to be mean, but I have assumed for many years that RescueTime is out of business or close to it, as I haven’t seen any new features (to my use case). I just assumed the market hasn’t worked out, but you keep the doors open because there are enough customers who consume the existing functionality. Was super surprised to get your email saying you’ve been building stuff (just stuff for your other markets), but more importantly, I was super surprised about your excitement for the future. That excites me because I very much want you guys to do well.

Please please please look into this feature: https://rescuetime.featureos.app/p/separate-tracking-of-youtube-accounts. For many years, YouTube has just wrecked my tracking because it is both very work-focused and also very funtime-focused. If this is fixed, RescueTime becomes much more useful for my use case, and I can’t help but think there are many other time trackers who would feel the same.

Thanks,
Bill

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Hi Sara,

I’m curious how you would imagine something like a template being applied to our project and task tracking / measurement tools-- do you mean something like a pre-named set of projects and tasks typical for a particular profession?

We did ponder making the actual labels themselves configurable. For example letting you make a setting that causes “project” to be called something else like “card” or whatever you want, and all that really matters is the hierarchy of time grouping (client > project > task), not what they were called, but decided that introduces a lot of complexity.

Perhaps in this case some user stories from different work patterns is helpful, to have in our documentation?

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Hi Bill,

Thanks for your support and thoughtful comments! And yes, a lot of the advancement in the last 4 or so years was hidden from “classic” users until being merged in over the last year-- perhaps a too-risk-averse situation, but also a simple matter of building compatibilities and translations as we went along.

With regard to the question about youtube account separation: yes, this is something we continue to struggle with solving, and it applies to web email and other things as well. Hopefully we can come up with something. For a while we had a solution that made a guess based on URL analysis, but then Google changed their path scheme (and continues to change it from time to time) such that a reliable solution, setting a side a deep integration, hasn’t been solved yet. We continue to look at it.

Thanks,
Mark

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