Why are some of my minutes marked idle?

Every minute of a shift carries one of three states: working, on break, or idle. Idle is what the desktop app writes when the computer went longer than your organization's threshold without keyboard or mouse input.

The threshold is a setting

It is called Idle after, it sits in the organization's tracking settings and it accepts one to sixty minutes. The default is five. Nobody changes it from the desktop app; the computers read the value from the organization.

Idle time is not lost time

An idle minute is still a tracked minute. It counts in the total for the day and it does not count as working time, so productivity shares, which are calculated over working minutes, leave it out. On the reports the minute stays attached to whatever application was in front at the time.

Reading, meetings and video calls

Two mechanisms exist for work that needs no keyboard:

• Work notes. Pick one on the Track tab and every minute counts as working while it is selected. Your organization writes the list of notes, so the tab is empty until somebody fills it.
• Always counted as working. Administrators can list applications and website hosts that never turn into idle time. The match is exact and case-sensitive, so meet.google.com and Meet.google.com are two different entries.

There is a mirror list, Always counted as on break. If a name appears on both, break wins.

A locked screen records nothing

While the screen is locked the app counts no seconds and sends no minute. That time is neither working nor idle, it is absent. Gaps of two to five minutes are filled in once an hour by repeating the minute before them; longer gaps stay empty.

The question when you come back

If the computer was quiet for fifteen minutes or more and then you touch it, the app asks what that stretch was. Choose I was away or I was on a break, write a reason, and it is sent as a manual time entry covering exactly that period. Whether it reaches the timesheet at once or waits for a manager depends on your organization's automatic approval setting. Manual time entries covers the rest.

Two cases produce no question: a stretch longer than ten hours, which is more than a single entry can hold, and organizations that have turned manual time entries off.

What the activity figure is not

The activity percentage beside the day is the count of seconds in a minute that had keyboard or mouse input. It is a number of seconds, never the keys themselves. What is collected and what is not lists the whole record.