Use RescueTime to Rescue Your TIME

Lyubishchev’s time statistics method.

4 min readApr 24, 2021

There’re lots of time management methods, like Promodoro, and lots of GTD methods. Every method has its own supporting theory. Some based on time frames, some based on to-do list. I’ve tried most of them and failed most of the time. Either because I’m tired of keeping up with timeframes or I messed up with my lists. I wanted something that can do everything automatically for me. I failed many times until I found RescueTime, the ultimate tool to manage your time without your attention based on the time statistics method. The only way to rescue your time.

Let’s get back to Lyubishchev’s time management method, it’s named after the famous scientist in the Soviet Union. He had lots of excellent achievements in different areas. He record the expenditure in the paper registers. He record everything, even if it’s talking with a friend, relaxing or reading a book. All the records became daily entries. He created monthly report based on those entries, figured out how much time spent on each time, then decided how much to spend during the next month. Also, from monthly report, he craeted yearly reprot, which in return would reflect the plan for next year.

This looks like a good method for me. What I need to do is just keep the record of all my time. But this is also the hardest part. How am I able to keep record of everything for each day! That’s impossible for someone like me. However, I still want to give it a try. First, I tried the old same way as our scientist, Lyubishchev’. Obviously, I failed in just a few days. I always forgot to write down something and it’s really hard to think of how much time I spent on each of them. Then, I tried some mordern way. I found some Apps on AppStore, which can help me record the time. What I need to do is just add all actives for my day to day life. Then for everytime I start an active, just choose one and click start, then the app will do the recording part for me. But still because of my bad memory, I always forgot to end the activies. God, it’s so hard for me.

Ok, I might not be as successfully as our scientist. But still there should be some kind of tool that can help me do all the dirty jobs and tell me where did I spend all my time. Nowdays, people doing most of their work on digital devices. If there’s any software that can record the expenditure on all the software I use from day to day without my intervention. It will be a perfect solution for me.

The ultimate solution for me is RecuseTime. It can record time you spend on different softwares and websites and then categorize them. By categorize, it gives productive score for each of them and calculate an overall productive score for monthly or yearly report. By default, it will give a score for most of the common website. For example, YouTube is not productive because we will spend time watching videos. But Coursera will be productive, because we’ll spend time on it to learn something. Apart from that, we can also customize productive score by ourselves, which means we just need a littile tweaking to make it work for us instead of create all of them from scratch. Perfect solution.

Ok, now we know what is RescueTime. Let’s get our hand dirty and try it out.

First, you need to create an account and then choose a plan. For most people like me, the Lite(free version) should be enough. It can help keep record for you time and provide daily, monthly and yearly report for you.

Then, you need to download the desktop version from here.

After then installation, start it and sign in with your new account.

That’s all you need to get started.

Then it will collect all daily activity for you and provide greate insight for your day to day productivity.

My Daily Report