Zenfeed
If you've ever installed a time-tracking app, you've had this exact moment. A weekly report lands, and it tells you, in plain numbers, that you spent fifty-five minutes on LinkedIn and ninety on YouTube last week. The number is real, and it's a little uncomfortable to look at, and then you open LinkedIn anyway, and nothing about what's waiting there looks any different than it did the week before.
RescueTime is the best-known app built around that exact moment, and I want to say plainly that it's honest software before I get into where it runs out. It doesn't gamify anything, it doesn't guilt-trip you, and it doesn't pretend to know whether an hour on LinkedIn was a good hour or a bad one. It just shows you the hour.
What does RescueTime actually track?
RescueTime runs quietly in the background on your computer or phone, logs which apps and websites you're in, and turns that into daily and weekly reports with a productivity score, category breakdowns, and, on its paid tier, a Focus Time feature that can block chosen sites for a set session.
That's the whole model: automatic, passive measurement, handed back to you as a dashboard. You don't log anything yourself, and the app doesn't moralize about what it finds — it just reports it.
The bet underneath a weekly report
The bet RescueTime is making is a reasonable one. If you see, in real numbers, that you spent an hour and a half on X this week when you meant to spend ten minutes, that knowledge is supposed to change what you do with the next hour. For a lot of people, seeing the real number really is the first step toward doing something about it, and RescueTime deserves credit for giving you the actual figure instead of a guess.
Does seeing the report actually change the next scroll?
Not by itself — the report tells you what already happened, after the feed has already done whatever it was going to do to that hour.
By the time Monday's email arrives, last Tuesday's ninety minutes on YouTube are already spent. You can resolve to do less of it this week, and that resolution is worth something. But it doesn't touch the specific thirty seconds when the YouTube homepage put a run of Shorts and a sponsored video between you and the video you actually opened the app to watch. The report is a mirror. It's pointed at you, after the fact — not at the feed, while it's happening.
What changes if you never see the noise at all
Zenfeed starts from the opposite end of the same hour. Instead of measuring the time you spend on LinkedIn, X, and YouTube and handing you a number afterward, it changes what's actually sitting inside the feed while you're still looking at it — so the ninety minutes a report would describe next Monday has less clutter packed into it to begin with.
What does Zenfeed do differently?
Zenfeed hides promoted and sponsored posts, suggested-content modules like LinkedIn's "People you may know," and anything matching your own keyword list on LinkedIn and X, plus a Rest from AI timer that puts AI-flagged posts away for a set number of minutes across all three sites.
On YouTube it does less, on purpose — Rest from AI, keywords, and an opt-in toggle for the Shorts shelf, on the Home, Subscriptions, and search pages, with the promoted and suggested filters scoped to LinkedIn and X only. There's no dashboard to check afterward, because there's nothing left to add up: the ad that got collapsed or the AI post that got rested never happened to that hour in the first place.
Bets on the week after. Measure everything automatically, then hand you a report you act on next time.
Bets on the scroll itself. Change what's in the feed while you're in it, so there's less to measure after.
None of this is a verdict on what you spent the time on, which is the same posture RescueTime takes, and the right one. An hour on LinkedIn isn't bad time. The complaint was never that the platform is a waste of an hour — it's that a chunk of that hour was always going to be an ad, a suggestion, or an AI post nobody asked to see, whether or not anything got measured afterward. I've written before about why friction-based apps like One Sec, Opal, and Freedom bet on the door instead of the feed — RescueTime is a third bet again: not the door, not the feed, but the mirror you check afterward.
A report tells you the truth about last week. Zenfeed changes what's true about this scroll.
Can you use both?
Yes, and there's no real conflict between them — RescueTime's reports and Zenfeed's filtering are measuring and changing two different things, not competing for the same job.
One tells you the truth about a pattern over weeks. The other changes what's inside a single scroll, right now. If a weekly number is what actually gets you to log off earlier, keep it. It just isn't the same fix as not seeing the ad in the first place, and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend Zenfeed replaces something it doesn't.
Why I built the mirror into the feed instead of a report about it
The honest reason is that I never needed a report to tell me I was spending time on LinkedIn — I already knew that, because I use it on purpose, for work and for people I actually follow. What I needed was for the time I was already choosing to spend there to have less junk crammed into it, and a dashboard that shows up a week later doesn't do that.