Idle time, measured like a human.
Idle handling is where monitoring tools are cruellest and least accurate: label every quiet pause as idle and you punish thinking; ignore idleness and you bill lunches. TimeNova measures the interval precisely.
One person's day, minute by minute
Active work, meetings, breaks and honest idle, in the order they happened. Idle under the limit stays inside tracked time and is shown, never deleted.
Idle as a per-person number
Activity level, idle minutes and unproductive share for a range. A quiet keyboard in a meeting counts as a meeting, not as idle.
How TimeNova counts idle
- Per-second, not per-slice. Each interval's trailing idle seconds are counted exactly; a five-second capture window is never wholesale labelled idle because its last second was quiet.
- Short pauses stay counted. Reading, thinking, sipping coffee: idle under the limit remains inside tracked time, reported as idle minutes, never deleted and never accused.
- Past the limit, the clock stops. Each person has their own timeout. Beyond it, time is not counted and capture pauses, so a forgotten tracker cannot bill an afternoon at the park.
- Meetings outrank idle, always. A quiet keyboard in a call is listening, and it is classified as work every time, with "quiet, in a call" reported as its own honest number.
- Two idle numbers, on purpose. Total idle seconds, and continuous idle minutes (unbroken runs of a minute or more), because "5 percent idle" and "took three long breaks" are different findings.
Why the fairness matters practically
Unfair idle math is the fastest way to teach a team keyboard-jiggling, and a team gaming its tracker produces numbers nobody can use. Honest idle keeps the data true. See how the whole day is classified in time tracking.
How idle is decided, and why the answer is not obvious
Idle measurement is where most implementations produce misleading figures, because a simple input threshold penalises non-typing work.
- Input is sampled every five seconds. Whether the keyboard or mouse moved, never what was typed. There is no keylogging in the product and the permission is never requested.
- You set the limit, per person. 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes. Below the limit, a quiet stretch is just work. Above it, the clock pauses by itself and nobody clocks their own lunch.
- A meeting is work, even in silence. Time in a call counts as worked time, because it is work. A tool that marks an hour of client discussion as idle is producing a number you will have to argue about later.
- Idle that happens is shown, not deleted. Reading, thinking and a coffee appear on the timeline as idle. Hiding them would make activity levels meaningless and make every report unarguable in the wrong direction.
- Activity level is the ratio, not a score. Active time over tracked time, per person and per range. It is not a productivity grade and we do not present it as one.
What activity level is not
Activity level is frequently misinterpreted, so its meaning is stated precisely.
- Not a productivity score. It measures whether hands were moving. A developer reading code and an architect drawing on paper are both working and both score low.
- Not a keystroke count. There is no keylogging. The sample records that input happened, never what it was.
- Not a reason to discipline somebody on its own. The timeline exists so a low figure can be explained in context, which is typically a meeting or an extended reading period.
- Not comparable across roles. A support agent and a designer will never have similar activity levels, and a league table of the two is a bad management decision the product will not help you make.
Focus and activity, asked every week
What exactly counts as idle?
No keyboard or mouse input for longer than the limit you set, which can be 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes per person. Below the limit, a quiet stretch is still worked time.
Do meetings count as idle?
No. Time in a call counts as worked time even when the keyboard is quiet, because that is what it is. This is the single most common complaint about tools in this category and the reason we handle it separately.
Is idle time deleted from the reports?
No, it is shown. Idle stretches appear on the timeline as idle. Removing them would flatter everybody and make the activity level meaningless.
Is a high activity level good?
Not necessarily, and TimeNova does not present it as a performance score. It measures whether hands were moving. Deep reading, thinking and meetings all score low and are all work.
Can each person have a different idle limit?
Yes, set per person. A support agent typing constantly and a designer working in long quiet stretches should not share the same threshold.