RescueTime Activities - An xbar Plugin

Monitor your RescueTime activities and distractions directly from the macOS menu bar with this xbar plugin.

Requirements

• macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or later; tested on macOS 14.5 (Sonoma)
• xbar (formerly BitBar)
• RescueTime

Installation

1. Install xbar manually
   • or via Homebrew: brew install --cask xbar
2. Open xbar and navigate to xbar > Open Plugin Folder and copy rescuetime-activities.3m.py into the plugin folder
   • or curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stared/xbar-rescuetime-activities/refs/heads/main/rescuetime-activities.3m.py -o ~/Library/Application\ Support/xbar/plugins/001-rescuetime-activities.3m.py
3. Refresh all plugins by selecting xbar > Refresh All Plugins
4. Generate a RescueTime API key
5. Open the plugin in xbar preferences via xbar > Open Plugin and enter your RescueTime API key
6. (optional) Install Pillow to view the daily productivity chart; the plugin will provide specific instructions, e.g., python3 -m pip install Pillow

Notes

Check out my earlier blog post: ADHD Tech Stack: Auto Time Tracking.

This plugin is inspired by the RescueTime plugin by Paul Traylor. I rewrote it to display a detailed list of activities, rather than just a summary of productive and distractive time.

TODO

• Add a weekly productivity chart