Sell RescueTime to your Team

Choosing to implement RescueTime can initially come across wrong in some company cultures. Many companies have very empowered/independent employees who might have a knee-jerk reaction to RescueTime. For many other companies, monitoring like this (or something like it) is typically assumed.

It's important to note that we built RescueTime for ourselves and are regular users of our own service. The way we've successfully achieved adoption at companies with empowered and high quality teams like ours has been through some combination of the following messaging:

Trust & Transparency

"RescueTime is about trust-- it's not a sign that it doesn't exist. Every person in this company has to trust every other person. We're adopting the concept of radical transparency-- if you want to see how your manager is spending her time, you can see it. Want to see how a peer is spending their time? You can see that. If anyone on this team doesn't want their peers to see how they are spending their time, what does that say about how they are spending their time? We want you to go home every day proud of how you spent it. And we don't want anyone at this company trying to deceive their coworkers by pretending to work when they don't have work to do or even when they just don't feel like working. Don't waste time trying to look busy. Need a break? Take one. Downtime can be just as important to productivity as focus time. Don't have anything to do? Fix that. There's no need to try to look busy when you aren't."

"RescueTime Empower is in the open. It's not a stealthy app. You can pause it. You can quit it. You can actually delete data from it (though you can't cheat and add productive time when you didn't spend it). The goal is to put this tool in the hands of the team, not to spy on the team. There are plenty of corporate spyware tools out there if we wanted to do that."

Time Does Not Equate to Productivity

"How you spend your time isn't a perfect measure of productivity-- sometimes it's not even a good measure of it. But it can be a great measure of workload and engagement. If someone on a team here has nothing to do, they might not be assertive enough to yell it out. Conversely, if someone on the team is pulling more than their fare share, they'll be recognized and relieved of some of the burden."

RescueTime has Privacy Controls

"We're only monitoring application usage and the following web sites. Sites that you visit that aren't on that list of web sites get recorded on RescueTime as unspecified browsing time. We don't care what sites you visit -- we are only trying to understand whether the apps and sites we as a company are paying for are getting used and whether the team is collectively productive or not."

"RescueTime only pays attention to your machine M-F, 8a-6pm-- and you can pause it whenever you want."

Company Success Through Efficiency

"We, as a company, manage every penny, as we should -- even though we know we're all responsible spenders, the ability to know how our spending is broken down and how it's trending is powerful. As a company, we don't really know how we spend our time even though an hour of time costs from $30-70 here, and we think that's bad. We think if we can collectively see this data, we'll be a smarter and more successful company."