It's easy to have a false sense of all the hours of work you're supposedly doing. Or you can hook it up to Beeminder and say, as I did, if I'm not writing for 2 hours every day (as in, actually typing and adding words to the page (it knows when you're staring at a page versus actually typing, by the way) ) then take my money.Ī lot of your PhD writeup and research will probably be digital-based, so RescueTime is ideal for keeping you honest as to exactly how much work you're getting done. RescueTime also has a version of site blocking where you can say, for example, if I spend over 1 hour on "very distracting time" or "watching videos", block all my internet for the next 3 hours (or something like that). This can be linked up to other sites, like Beeminder, to enforce some kind of time limit. So it's good for tracking the amount of time you're writing (tasks are rated from very unproductive to very productive on a 5-point scale) and it's good for tracking what sites you're visiting during the day. With RescueTime, you can be sure to be delivered an accurate summary of all the ways you are inefficient and wasting your time. Also, that method of time tracking isn't particularly good at noting when you go down a hole of Youtube distraction that one time you have to search for something online. I've experimented with various kinds of activity and time trackers in the past, and my experience is that if you have to actively turn it on and off when you start and stop what you're doing, you'll probably forget. You can visit the website to see your stats, or it also sends you a weekly summary of what you did. It sits in the background, watching where you spend your time.
#Rescuetime vs freedom android#
RescueTime is a passive activity tracker for what you do on your laptop (or Android phone - limitations in Apple's iOS mean that it's not possible to have the same detail in app usage tracking from iPhones and iPads).