What is activity level, and how is it measured?

Activity level is the share of your working minutes that carried keyboard or mouse input. It appears on the Work times report, on team rows and in the comparison section of Advanced insights.

How the number is produced

The desktop app checks once a second whether the computer is receiving input. It keeps a counter for the current minute: each active second adds one, and the counter stops at sixty. At the end of the minute that count is sent with the rest of the record and the counter starts again from zero.

A minute where you typed the whole time reports sixty. A minute where you read a document without touching anything reports zero. Most real minutes land somewhere in between, and the report shows the average over the range you picked.

What is never recorded

Only whether input happened. Which keys were pressed, what was typed and where the mouse went are not read and not stored. The number that leaves your computer is a count between zero and sixty, nothing else.

Activity level is not a productivity score

The two answer different questions and they can disagree. Activity level asks whether the keyboard moved. The productivity split asks which application the minute was spent in.

A designer nudging a slider in a design tool can show a low activity level and a fully productive minute. Someone typing quickly in a game shows the opposite. Reading a long specification is real work and reports almost no activity at all.

This is why the number is worth reading as a pattern over weeks rather than as a verdict on a day. A single low day usually means the work that day was reading, thinking or meeting, not that nothing happened.

Its relationship with idle time

Idle time and activity level come from the same signal but answer different questions. A minute becomes idle when there has been no input for longer than the threshold your organization set, which is five minutes by default. Activity level measures how much input there was inside the minutes that were not idle.

Idle minutes are excluded from the activity calculation, so a long break does not drag the figure down. It is measured over working time only.