How Automatic Tracking Works

What Rize tracks, how live entries work, and how to control your privacy settings.

Open your dashboard to review live tracking and privacy controls.

What Rize Tracks

Rize captures metadata about your currently active window:

  • App name -- which application is in focus
  • Window title -- the title bar text of the active window
  • URL -- the address bar content (browser tabs only)
  • Timestamps -- when each activity started and ended

This metadata is auto-categorized based on your tracking rules and used to generate time entries.

What Rize Never Tracks

  • Screenshots or screen recordings
  • Keystrokes or mouse movements
  • Document contents or text inside apps
  • File contents or clipboard data

Rize answers "what kind of work happened and when?" -- not what was typed or read.

Live Background Tracking

Rize creates time entries in real time as you work instead of batching them after the fact. A new entry appears on your calendar the moment you start working.

When your context switches -- say from Figma to Slack -- the previous entry is automatically finalized with an AI-generated description and tag suggestions.

You can click any live entry to finalize it on demand. This segments the block into smaller entries and generates suggestions immediately.

Automatic Tracking Schedule

Set your tracking hours in Settings > Activity > Automatic Tracking Schedule. Rize starts and stops tracking on the schedule you define.

If tracking is paused and the schedule is disabled, Rize will not restart automatically -- you need to resume manually.

Pausing Tracking

Click the power icon in the bottom left corner of your dashboard to pause tracking. Click again to resume. Your status changes to "Paused" while tracking is off.

Excluding Apps and Websites

Go to Settings > Tracking Rules > New Rule to exclude specific apps or websites from tracking entirely. This is useful for personal browsing, private tools, or noisy applications.

You can also exclude directly from activity: hover over an activity entry and select "Exclude from tracking."

Privacy Controls

Fine-tune what Rize captures in Settings > Privacy:

  • URL Tracking -- disable entirely or track only the domain (not the full path)
  • Title Tracking -- disable window title capture
  • Meeting Attendee Emails -- disable tracking of calendar event attendees

Redacting Your Data

  • Manual redaction: Settings > Privacy > "Redact Tracked Data" -- deletes all app and website data while preserving categories, projects, and productivity metrics
  • Scheduled redaction: Settings > Privacy > Scheduled Data Redaction -- automatically redacts on a recurring basis

More in Time Tracking