How Meetings Work (VIDEO)

Connect your Google and/or Outlook Calendars (Exchange will not work). You can connect your calendar under Settings > Calendar Integration > "add a new calendar integration". You can only connect one Google and one Outlook calendar at this time.

Now RescueTime recognizes two types of meetings: scheduled meetings and unscheduled meetings. Let's talk about scheduled meetings first.

RescueTime recognizes a scheduled meeting in one of two ways: as a meeting with more than one participant (the participant does not have to accept the invite) or when you use the hashtag #meeting in the title or description of the calendar event. Make sure this event is created in your main calendar and not the RescueTime calendar. This scheduled meeting will also show up in your Morning Briefing alert on your Assistant. You'll see a Join Meeting pinned alert. if you have a Zoom or Google Meet link in your calendar event, then you'll see a "Join Meeting" button and this will take you directly to the meeting app. All this time will be allocated as a scheduled meeting in your Meetings Report. Activities during this time will not show on your Activities page because all that time has been assigned to scheduled meetings. However, you can find these activities on your Analytics page and filter by hour.

During a scheduled meeting you'll have the option to choose "This meeting ended early" on your Assistant. Clicking this button will allow normal activity tracking to resume, and you'll see them reported on your Activities page, however, it will not adjust your scheduled meeting time. If you need this time adjusted in your Meetings Report, then you'll need to update it on your calendar event.

If you don't want RescueTime to recognize this event as a meeting then you can use the #notameeting hashtag. A use case could be if you were tentatively attending a meeting.

Now let's talk about unscheduled meetings. Anytime meetings are done outside of your calendar, where it's not scheduled in your calendar, and outside of your scheduled meetings, for example, if it starts earlier or ends later than the time in your calendar event then these are recognized as unscheduled meetings. During an unscheduled meeting, only time spent on the meeting app like Google Meet or Zoom will be accounted for here. Any browsing that you do away from your meeting app will be reported on your Activities page.