Updates to our Zapier Integration!

The RescueTime app on Zapier helps you connect your time to hundreds of applications, letting you make updates in other apps based on your time and logging important actions that happen outside of RescueTime. We recently added some new features that we’re really psyched about: offline time logging, actions and weekly report exporting.

If you’re unfamiliar with Zapier, it’s a service that makes it easy for non-developers to connect two (or more) different web applications together. It’s a great way to automate tedious parts of your work so you can focus on other things. You create Zaps, small workflows that chain two or more applications together to accomplish a task. It’s one of the tools we get the most mileage out of around the RescueTime offices. It’s a fantastic Swiss-army knife of a tool that just seems to get better the more I use it. Every week or so I stumble on something really valuable to automate.

Here’s how RescueTime works with Zapier

You can log offline time

Offline time shows up alongside your other activities
Offline time shows up alongside your other activities

You can connect any other app that exports events with a start / stop time – such as your calendar – and automatically log that time in RescueTime. Lots of people have requested this feature and we’re really thrilled with the number of services that Zapier makes this possible with. You can track workouts with RunKeeper or MapMyFitness, meetings with Google Calendar, or import time logged with Harvest or Toggl.

One thing to keep in mind: Calendars can be tricky, noisy messes, and if you aren’t careful, you can accidentally log inaccurate or useless time. Zapier’s advanced filters really shine here, though. You can use them to weed out the noise from your calendar and only log the activities you really want.

You can export weekly & daily summaries
Every week, a new summary is available with details about how you spent your time. You can use these summaries to construct your own custom email reports, log a note in Evernote, update a spreadsheet, or post a status to Slack or HipChat.

The logic you can add within a Zap comes in handy here. You can get really fancy with it if you want. For example: If a weekly summary comes in, you can check it to see how much productive time you logged, and if it’s an absurdly high number, you can post a message in Slack bragging about it, but silently do nothing if your time that week was less flattering. 🙂

Zapier's filters let you act on data only if it meets the right conditions
Zapier’s filters let you act on data only if it meets the right conditions

Other apps can respond to your RescueTime alerts
RescueTime alerts keep you informed in real-time about how your day is shaping up. They can also trigger actions in other apps. You can brag to your co-workers on Slack when you’ve been super-productive (or to your friends on Facebook, for that matter), track your alert times in a Google Sheet, or update a goal on Beeminder. My personal favorite is the Zap I have that calls my phone when I’m working too late at night and tells me to knock it off.

You can automate your FocusTime sessions
Sometimes, really important stuff happens in other apps that you need to respond to with your full attention. Or there are times you just want to focus and not be disturbed. FocusTime and Zapier are your best friends in those moments. When Pingdom alerts you that your website is down, you can automatically start FocusTime so you won’t be distracted while looking for a fix. If you use Toggl for time tracking, you can automatically start FocusTime whenever you start a new timer so you can devote 100% of your concentration to getting the job done.

You can log data points from other apps as Actions

examples of actions logged from other apps
examples of actions logged from other apps

Actions in RescueTime are a new-ish feature*. They automatically collect data points from other applications so you can see what you’re accomplishing alongside the time you’re spending on different activities. Any trigger from another app can automatically log an action in RescueTime. You can log actions for blog posts in WordPress, completed cards in Trello, tasks completed in Todoist or Asana, or even checkins at coffee shops in Swarm.

*actions used to be a subset of Daily Highlights, but they’ve been upgraded and can now be categorized and scored just like time logs. You can still use Zapier to log daily highlights as well.

For more ideas on how to use the RescueTime integration, check out some of the popular RescueTime Zaps on Zapier.

 

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