Key takeaways
- Admins classify applications and domains as Productive, Neutral or Unproductive with their own rules. Nothing is hardcoded.
- Rules can match by application, domain or keyword.
- Only active time is categorized, and anything no rule matches is shown as Unclassified.
No tool is productive or unproductive on its own. A video site is a distraction for one team and research material for a marketing team. That is why TIMO360 ships no built-in judgement about any application or website: as an app categorization productivity tool, it leaves the rules to each organization.
What gets recorded
To categorize activity, the agent records which application is in the foreground, its window title as text, and the browser domain of the site in use. It records the domain only: never full page URLs, query strings or page content.
The categories
Productive, Neutral or Unproductive: assigned by the rules you write, so the meaning of each is up to you
Unclassified: time in an application or domain that none of your rules match
Rules by application, domain or keyword
Admins write rules that match an application, a domain or a keyword, and can switch each rule on or off. Because the rules are yours, an engineering team can classify its IDEs and terminals as Productive, while a support team does the same for its ticketing tools.
An optional starter set
New organizations are offered a suggested set of rules to start from. It is opt-in: you can apply it, edit it or ignore it entirely. It treats developer and documentation sites such as GitHub and Stack Overflow as Productive, email and chat such as Gmail, Outlook and Slack as Neutral, and YouTube, Facebook and Instagram as Unproductive. Marketing and engineering teams often disagree on the last group, which is the reason to edit it.
Only active time is categorized
Productive, Neutral and Unproductive time is only ever counted from active time. Idle time is counted as idle and nothing else, so the three categories together never add up to more than the active total.
Where the categories show up
Daily reports list the applications and website domains in use, classified by your rules, next to working, idle and break time. That is app usage analytics without screenshots: it shows where active time goes, using your own definitions rather than a vendor's.
Good practice
Start from how each team actually works, and write rules per tool, not per assumption.
Tell employees what the categories are and how the reports are used, as in the rollout checklist.
Review the rules now and then as your tools change.
What categorization does not do
TIMO360 does not connect to or read the content of your tools. It sees the application name and browser domain, never what is on the page, what was typed or any screenshots.
See how it fits with active and idle time, and read the FAQ answer on categorization.