Key takeaways
- Deep work looks idle to a keyboard-only signal, so set the idle threshold with engineering work in mind.
- Meetings count as active time, and breaks pause tracking.
- Application rules let an IT team classify its own tools instead of accepting a vendor's idea of productive.
A developer reading a stack trace, a tester watching a build or an architect thinking through a design may not touch the keyboard for several minutes. Employee activity monitoring for IT companies has to handle that fairly, or the numbers will say the opposite of what is true.
The problem with keyboard-only signals
TIMO360 reports keyboard and mouse presence as active or idle. That is the right level of data for privacy, but it means long stretches of reading or thinking can register as idle. The fix is not more surveillance. It is a sensible idle threshold, set by an administrator in Preferences, and honest use of breaks and meetings.
Breaks and meetings
Breaks pause tracking, so lunch or a walk is never counted as idle.
Meetings count as active time even without input, which covers stand-ups, planning, pairing calls and client sessions.
Classify your own tools
For IT teams, application and domain rules are the useful part. You can write rules that match an application, a domain or a keyword, so your IDEs, terminals and documentation sites are classified the way your team works, not the way a vendor guessed. Those rules apply only to active time.
What stays private
The agent records the application name, window title as text and browser domain. It never records code, keystroke content, screenshots or full page URLs. That matters when engineers work with confidential repositories.
Reading the reports fairly
Treat a day's tracked time as one signal. Compare patterns across weeks, not single hours, and talk to engineers about their numbers before drawing conclusions.
See monitoring for IT companies, active versus idle time and app and domain categorization.