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Our mission at RescueTime is to help you find balance and spend more time on the things that truly matter to you. To help you get there, we analyzed 185 million working hours of anonymized and aggregated data on how RescueTime users spent their time last year.

Looking at how people spent their time in 2018, we found that knowledge workers, on average, have just 2 hours and 48 minutes a day for productive tasks (or 14 hours and 8 minutes a week).

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When we break this down by job role, however, a few changes show up. First, people who work in support are more likely to start the day earlier (closer to 8:30 AM), while designers and students have the latest average start time (around 9:40 AM).

Longer time spent on our devices and minimal time for productive work mean we end up working earlier, later, and even on weekends. According to one survey, 33% of salaried workers said they do work on the weekend.

When we looked at communication time across job titles we found that software developers spend, on average, 21% of their day on communication. While executives and product managers spend upwards of 37%!

Most of us spend our days bouncing from task to task or trying to make up for lost time by multitasking. (On average, we use 56 different apps and websites a day and switch between them nearly 300 times.)

As we wrote earlier, 21% of our device time during working hours is spent on entertainment, news, and social media. With the most time spent on distracting activities taking place on November 26th and July 7th (the Mondays after Thanksgiving and the 4th of July).

If you want to become your most productive self, you need to understand how you spend your time. There's no better tool for doing that than RescueTime. This service, which works mostly behind the scenes, has been one of our favorite productivity apps for years. It gives you insight into where the minutes and hours of the day go while you're on your computer or mobile device. A free version is more than sufficient for most people, while a somewhat pricey Premium version provides more in-depth analysis. RescueTime continues to impress us after many years of use. It's a wonderful tool for the modern workplace and an Editors' Choice winner.

RescueTime is not a time-tracking tool for freelancers and other people who bill by the hour. Nor is it employee monitoring software. Rather, it's a personal tool that gives you insight into how you use your time on your devices without you having to start and stop timers or do anything at all.

RescueTime is an app you install on your computer and mobile devices that automatically pays attention to the apps you use, which files you open, and what websites you visit. It logs how much time you spend in each of them. There are options for turning it on and off, as well as setting it to automatically run only during the days and hours you want. It has a pause button preset for 15 minutes and one hour, which makes it easy to disable during breaks.

As RescueTime collects data about how you spend your time on your devices, it categorizes the time and labels it as productive or distracting on a five-step scale. For example, time spent using Microsoft Word might be categorized as business or writing and labeled highly productive. Time spent on The New York Times website could be productive or distracting, depending on your work and how you use that site, so you get to choose how to classify it. If you don't bother to categorize anything, RescueTime makes guesses for you.

Once you've used RescueTime for a bit, the app generates reports with insights on how you spend your time over time. For example, it might show that in a given day you spent 50% of your time doing work categorized as Design & Composition, 23% on Communication & Scheduling, 7% on Social Networking, and so forth. A monthly or yearly report might show that you tend to be most productive on Tuesdays and least productive on Friday afternoons. Or you might recognize that you burn yourself out and become unproductive on days when you don't take adequate breaks or stop working at a reasonable hour. Seeing these patterns and habits gives you the chance to conscientiously work to improve them.

RescueTime offers two tiers of service for personal use: Lite (free) and Premium ($9 per month or $78 per year). The free version is more than adequate for first-time users, and we recommend using a free account for at least a month before deciding to upgrade. We'll cover the differences between free and paid accounts later.

There's now a team plan, too, if you want to roll out RescueTime across an organization or group. It starts at $6 per person per month. Teams can also sign up for additional time-management training for $99 per person.

Comparing RescueTime's price to that of other apps requires an open mind because few apps do exactly what RescueTime does. Qbserve is one of the most similar apps available, and it charges a flat one-time fee of $29. It's only available for macOS, however, whereas RescueTime works on Windows, Linux, Android, and mobile Apple devices, in addition to macOS. RescueTime also has browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

More traditional time-tracking apps for freelancers (which let workers track billable hours) cost more, but typically include tools for generating invoices. Harvest ($12 per person per month for Premium) is a decent example. Toggl Track is another. Its rates for a premium version have gone up considerably in the last few years and now start at $20 per person per month. Both Harvest and Toggl Track offer capable free versions, too.

Free Lite members get all of RescueTime's core functionality. They can install RescueTime anywhere it works and have it track how much time they spend using every website and app. RescueTime Lite doesn't track file names, however. Lite members get all the tools for categorizing the apps and sites they use as productive or unproductive, and they can set goals such as spend X hours per week on productive tasks and fewer than Y hours on unproductive stuff. Free members can also opt to receive a weekly email report. Perhaps the most important limitation of a free account is that you can only view your stats going back two weeks, whereas paying members get unlimited data history. Previously, RescueTime gave away three months of data for free, so it has become more restrictive.

If you're interested in blocking distracting websites, you can get it from other free browser extensions, regardless of whether you use RescueTime. Strict Workflow is one example. This extension puts a little timer in your browser bar, and the idea is to work without distraction for whatever amount of time you set. During that focused work session, the extension prevents you from opening a list of distracting websites, and you get to choose what's on that list. Once you complete a focused work session, you then take a timed break.

One simple but effective piece of information RescueTime provides is an analysis of when you tend to be the most productive during the day. You can run this report for a single day or to show an average over a week, month, or year. How does this information benefit you? Let's say you notice your productivity tends to be highest from 9-11 a.m. and again from 2-4 p.m. You could start using a time-management technique, such as time-blocking, to plan your most important tasks for those highly productive windows. Save meetings, email, and other work that requires less focus for the other hours of the day.

The other key metric is called a Productivity Pulse score. It's a daily score, shown as a percent, based on the percent of time spent on very productive, productive, neutral, distracting, and very distracting activities. To be clear, no one is advocating for a 100% Productivity Pulse score. This score is more of a baseline for comparing one day to another. A RescueTime blog post notes that the average score is 67% percent and the in-house average at the company is 79%.

While testing the app, neither one worked as expected. On Android, it tracked total screen time, but not the individual apps I used. On iPhone, it tracked the number of phone pickups and their location, but not the apps I used. You're better off using Apple Screen Time if you want a detailed look at how long you use your iPhone each day and what you do on it. As for Android, we at PCMag don't have an alternative recommendation for a time-tracking app at this time.

RescueTime is an outstanding tool for anyone who wants to understand how they spend time on their devices. Whether you want to actively change your behaviors or merely want insight into your work habits and time-management skills, start with this tool. RescueTime is a rare five-star product and one of the best productivity tools we've ever tested.

Research has consistently found that context switching kills our productivity, by slowing us down and making us feel rushed, overworked, and susceptible to burn out. If you want to do your best work, you need to have control over how your screen time affects the rest of your work. So, just how much screen time are we actually using during the workday?

But while the sessions themselves are short in duration, they can set off a chain reaction of events that take over our days. Surprisingly, we found that 50% of screen time sessions start within 3 minutes of the previous one.

Not only are you only able to use your laptop in certain scenarios (rather than scroll aimlessly through your smartphone). But it can be much easier to understand and control your time spent on your laptop, using tools like:

Let's say you want to see details of your Gmail activities. While viewing your "by hour" reports, click on the "Summary" tab at the top of the page and you'll see how much time you spent on each particular email.

One great way to visualize your data and get a sense of how your activities, categories, and productivity have changed over time, is to view the trending report. Within the graph view, you can keep an eye on long-term trends for a given day, week or month, and make comparisons over time. 2351a5e196