If your organization has application and website tracking switched on, the desktop app records which app was in front while the timer ran, and, separately if enabled, which website. The Apps & URLs page turns that into a picture of the day.
The five categories
- Productive: editors, design tools, office documents, project tools.
- Communication: email, chat, video calls. Kept apart from productive because it is work, but too much of it is a pattern you want to see.
- Learning: documentation, courses, reference material.
- Neutral: everything with no obvious verdict.
- Unproductive: social media, entertainment, shopping.
Where the labels come from
StaffVertex ships with a large default list covering the applications and sites most teams use. It is a starting point, not a judgement about your organization. It does not know that a video site is research for your team, or that a social network is where your marketer works.
Correcting them
Administrators can open Manage categories and recategorise anything. Your change becomes an override for your organization, and the default is left alone underneath, so you can revert to it later with one click. Load or refresh the defaults from the same screen if you want to start from the shipped list.
Overrides apply to how time is reported from then on. Spending twenty minutes on this once, early, beats explaining every month why the numbers look wrong.
Reading the page
You get time by category, the applications and sites with the most time against them, and a productivity summary. Filter by member, project or date range to answer a specific question instead of browsing.
What is not recorded
Page content, what you typed into a site, form contents, private browsing outside the tracked window, and anything at all while the timer is stopped. The record is: this application, or this address, for this long, while tracking.
Using it fairly
Category time is context, not a score. Ten minutes on a news site during an eight-hour day is a break. An afternoon of it is a conversation. The page cannot tell the difference, so you have to.