Hey, I just found out that Rescuetime finally got round to releasing an API. Anyone done a cool thing with it? I have about 2 -3 years of data in their system.
We’ve been using RescueTime data in Exist for a while. We now have GitHub and Todoist data integrated as well, so we’re able to find lots of correlations and insights in your productivity data over time. If you’re curious, there are some examples here and here.
You’ll need to be logged in to see this page, but there’s a big list here of services RescueTime integrates with.
Would love to hear any other cool examples of people using RescueTime data, also!
Finally? Their API has been available for several years now 
Personally, I’m using RescueTime just for keeping track of what times of the day I spend how much time on my devices. For example, I looked into whether or not screen time in the evening appears to affect my sleep:
This is a great simple experiment and presentation. Thanks Eric!
Lately, I’ve been playing around with RescueTime’s (excellent) API to track my “Productivity Pulse” and trends of how I spend time on my computer/phone over time.
I’ve also been crunching the data from RescueTime to create “Events”. RT’s API data is very cool but it’s very granular and it doesn’t give an overview of how I spend chunks of time at the computer in a user-friendly way. So I wrote some code that converts their granular data into slightly more useful reports that show things like “Work” and “Watching” chunks of time.(red is “work”, blue is “watching” and grey is chunks of time spent at computer/phone doing things that fall inbetween.
Some of the data is very granular, but other data isn’t quite granular enough: For example, you can’t see how often you picked your phone up (as there is no distinction between multiple mobile devices, and no concept of sessions)…
Agreed. I had to reverse engineer aproximated sessions from RescueTime’s API to “focused work” sessions (in red) and “watching” sessions (in blue). It’s imperfect but in my case it helps me track a few more large parts of my day automagically …
It isn’t perfect but when I combine that data with my fitbit sleep and activity data from Fitbit’s API, the slots line up pretty well. Purple is what fitbit logged as my sleep time, green is exercise and the dark green is manually logged dinner…
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wow that looks very nice. could you share the framework as i can see if i can fit my garmin with rescuetime. i am very curious on this study
It’s all available to the public, for free, at https://eventloggers.com
Once you create an account, visit https://eventloggers.com/apis/rescuetime and follow the steps to connect. Once you do, you should see a summary of your information similar to these:
(if you run in to any trouble, just message me)
