RescueTime, a Seattle-based company that went through Y Combinator, is fundamentally a time-tracking and analytics tool first, with blocking added on as a paid feature. That's a meaningfully different starting point from a purpose-built blocker, and it shows in what the product is actually good at: understanding where your time goes, not primarily stopping you from spending it. The company has weathered real changes over the years, including the passing of co-founder Joe Hruska in 2017, and continues to operate as a small, focused team of roughly ten people rather than a large, venture-scaled operation. The company's roughly ten-person team size also means RescueTime has stayed a focused, sustainably run product rather than chasing the kind of rapid, venture-backed growth that sometimes pulls a smaller company's attention away from its original core feature.
What RescueTime actually does
RescueTime automatically tracks time across desktop apps, browser extensions and mobile companion apps, producing detailed daily and weekly reports on where your time actually went, broken down by category and specific app or site. Its opt-in "Focus Sessions" feature — available on paid plans — blocks activities you've personally classified as "Distracting" or "Personal," and can be triggered automatically via a `#focustime` tag on calendar events, so a meeting-free work block on your calendar can start the restriction for you without any manual step. RescueTime's reporting also breaks down productivity by time of day and day of week, letting you see not just which apps consumed your time but when in your schedule you're actually most vulnerable to distraction in the first place.
Where RescueTime is honestly the better pick
Nothing in this whole comparison set matches RescueTime's depth of automatic analytics — if what you actually want is a clear, detailed picture of where your time goes across every app and site you use, not just a block on a handful of them, that's RescueTime's genuine specialty, built from years of refining exactly that reporting. Calendar integration, so a "focus time" block on your calendar automatically triggers blocking, is also a real, distinctive convenience that removes an entire manual step most other apps in this comparison set still require. For anyone who has never actually measured their own screen time accurately before, RescueTime's automatic, effortless tracking is also simply a better starting point than guessing, since most people's intuitive sense of how much time they spend on a given app is reliably wrong in one direction or another.
| Feature | RescueTime | Mr. Grummel |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | Desktop apps/extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, Arc, Brave) plus iOS and Android companion apps | iOS & Android (in development) |
| Core mechanism | Automatic time-tracking with detailed reports; a paid, opt-in blocking feature ("Focus Sessions") driven by your own activity classifications | Answer a quiz question from the app's curriculum to unlock |
| Self-bypassable? | Yes, straightforwardly — blocking is driven by categories you set yourself and can edit at any time; no tamper-resistance mechanism found | Not yet released — can't be assessed |
| Physical hardware required? | No | No |
| Price | Freemium; Focus Sessions/blocking is a paid-tier feature, reported around $6.50–7/mo | Not yet announced — join the waiting list |
The one mechanical difference that actually matters
RescueTime's blocking, where it exists at all, is entirely self-directed: you decide in advance which activities count as distracting, and you retain full control to change that classification whenever you like, with nothing stopping you from simply reclassifying an app the moment it becomes inconvenient. That makes it more of a productivity mirror than a friction tool, genuinely useful for understanding your own patterns but not built to resist you in a weak moment. Mr. Grummel doesn't ask you to classify anything in advance — the friction is built in and constant, three questions every time, rather than a rule you set once and can just as easily unset the moment it stops being convenient. It's also worth adding that RescueTime was never really designed to fight a determined, in-the-moment urge — its blocking feature reads more like a convenience layered on top of genuinely excellent analytics than a core product decision the whole app was built around from day one.
Who should pick which
If what you actually want is a detailed, automatic picture of where your time goes — across your whole computer and phone, not just a blocklist — RescueTime's analytics-first approach is doing a genuinely different, valuable job that a blocker alone can't replicate. If you already know what pulls your attention and want something that actually stands in the way rather than just reporting on it afterward, that's where Mr. Grummel's quiz-gate comes in instead, and the two could plausibly complement each other rather than compete for the same role. It's also entirely reasonable to run RescueTime purely for its analytics, without ever touching Focus Sessions at all, and pair that insight with a separate, stricter tool like Mr. Grummel for the actual moment-to-moment enforcement. It's also worth trying RescueTime's free trial specifically to see how accurate its automatic categorisation is for your actual mix of apps and sites, since a tool that gets the categorisation wrong is less useful regardless of how good its reporting otherwise looks.