Every tracked minute is graded Soft, Medium or Hard. Know exactly what that measures, because it is easy to read more into it than is there.
What is measured
How much of each minute had keyboard or mouse activity. Not what you typed. Not which keys. Not the content of anything. Just this: in that sixty seconds, how many seconds had input.
It is not raw event counts, which would reward wiggling the mouse and punish typing carefully. Active seconds within the minute is much harder to game and much closer to reality.
The three levels
- Hard: sustained input for most of the minute. Writing, coding, data entry.
- Medium: regular input with gaps. The normal texture of thinking work.
- Soft: little input. Reading, watching, listening, thinking.
Soft does not mean idle
This is the point most often missed. A Soft minute still counts fully towards your hours. Reading a specification, reviewing a design, sitting in a call: all real work, all Soft. Idle detection is what decides whether time counts at all, while activity level only describes its texture.
Manual entries have no activity level at all, because there was nothing to measure.
Strictness is an organization setting
Administrators choose one of three strictness settings in Settings → Work & Time Settings, which decides how much input a minute needs to earn each label. The lenient setting grades generously, and the strict one demands sustained activity throughout.
The right choice depends on the work. A team that writes code all day can afford a strict setting. A team that spends its day reading, meeting and reviewing will look permanently unproductive on one, and the number will be wrong.
Changing it does not rewrite history
Each minute is graded once, when it is recorded, and keeps that grade forever. Changing the strictness affects new time only. A setting change should never silently rewrite last month's reports.
For managers
Use activity as a prompt for a conversation, never as a verdict. Consistently Soft weeks might mean disengagement, or might mean somebody whose job is reading contracts. The number cannot tell you which. Only asking can.