2026-11-02
Your contractor was reading, and the tracker logged it as idle: what three vendors' own docs say happens to those minutes
Some work barely touches the keyboard. Reading a source document, a client's contract or a page of annotation guidelines takes time, and almost none of it is typing. A tracker that counts input sees nothing happening. Apploye, WebWork and iMerit's Ango Hub each say in their own help pages what they do with those minutes. The details differ, and they decide whether the reading counts and who gets to say so.
If Harvest's renewal has you pricing trackers for researchers, reviewers or annotators, read this setting before the price. Harvest's desktop apps have idle detection too, and Harvest describes it as a fix for a forgotten timer: it "helps you correct any periods where you may have left a timer running unintentionally." In the three tools below, the same quiet minutes become a question about whether the person was working at all.
What each tool counts as activity
All three count input. None of them counts reading.
- Apploye: "Active Time refers to periods of productive work when there is keyboard and/or mouse activity." Another of its help pages sets the pace: "With Apploye, the user must have an activity every 20 seconds, and then it will count as active time." Time without activity is "Neutral" time.
- WebWork: "WebWork monitors activity every minute through mouse movements, keyboard inputs, and scrolling." It goes "minute by minute, marking any full minute without input as inactive."
- Ango Hub: the labeling editor "detects mouse movement, mouse clicks, keyboard input, scrolling, touch interactions" on the task page. "Activity in another application or the browser's address bar does not count as activity in the editor."
Of the three, only Ango Hub's docs say it out loud: "Reading an asset, watching a video, or listening to audio without interacting with the page can reach the idle timeout." A line later they add: "The timer measures detected activity, not whether you are making annotation changes." The other two list keyboard and mouse, and WebWork adds scrolling. Neither lists anything a reader does with their eyes.
How long a page can take before it is idle
- Apploye, five minutes and no lower: "By default, it is set to 5 minutes, after which any neutral time will automatically be recorded as idle." Five is also the floor: "In settings, the minimum time is 5 minutes for idle time." A pause of one or two minutes stays neutral. Past five minutes, another of its pages says, "that neutral time will also be considered idle time." Six minutes on one page without touching anything is idle.
- WebWork, one minute: its definition has no grace period, and every full minute without input is inactive. On top of that, an auto-stop "automatically stops tracking after a specified period of inactivity (which you set)," and WebWork says "Most employers set auto-stop between 10-30 minutes of inactivity." Read for longer than the setting and the tracker stops.
- Ango Hub, 300 seconds by default: "The default for a new project is 300 seconds (5 minutes)." The project manager can change it, and "The field accepts values from 5 to 10,000 seconds." For anyone checking a reference in another tab, the docs say switching to another browser tab "normally starts idle timing immediately."
What happens to the minutes after that
Apploye gives the organization three choices, under Settings > Activity. With "Ask Member," "the member will decide whether to keep the idle time." With "Don't Ask Member," "the member won't be asked, and the idle time will be automatically logged." Apploye's page recommends that one: "To track the idle time of employees, we recommend choosing 'Don't Ask Member'." "Never" turns detection off, though "this setting will not disable neutral time tracking." After that, the admin has the last word. Idle time can be deleted from the timesheet, or kept and refused: "If you don't want to delete the idle time, you can reject that amount of time to omit idle time from the payroll."
WebWork asks the worker first. "When your team members return to their workstations after inactivity, WebWork's inactivity popup asks if they were still working during the inactive period." If they were, they can "add that time back as idle time with optional activity descriptions, converting inactive minutes to legitimate work time." The admin sets the terms: "You can require activity descriptions for all idle time entries and review these descriptions in detailed reports." The admin can also turn the way back off: "You can also disable idle time recovery entirely so it is not counted as worked time."
Ango Hub keeps two clocks. When the timeout hits, "active timing stops, idle timing begins, and the dot turns gray," and "Detected activity resumes active timing." Idle time is recorded as its own number, and it goes into the export when someone turns it on: "To include idle-time data, enable Idle Durations under Fields > Include in the export options." The docs don't say what a project does with that number. They do warn about one more way to lose a reading session: "Leaving a task without saving, submitting, or skipping does not save the time recorded since the last save."
Import your Harvest account and read the reconciliation
Free for 2 people and 1 active project; $9 per active member per month after that, no usage fees on anything. The import runs on the free plan.
The reader is the only one who knows
Put the three side by side and they work the same way. The tool can't see reading, so it records quiet. Then it offers a way back: a popup the worker answers (when they're asked at all), a description they write, or an approval screen where someone else decides. Each step asks the reader to explain the reading after the fact, to a tool that has already filed it as idle.
A timesheet asks the question the other way around. What did you work on, and for how long? The person who did the reading types the answer, and a reviewer reads it. That's the line in Time tracking that does not watch you. The payroll side, including what the Department of Labor says about short breaks, is in our post on Monitask's idle setting.
How Winnows handles a reading hour
Winnows has no idle detection, so there is no idle minute to reject. The week is one row per project and task. The contractor types a duration or runs the timer, a stopwatch they start and stop, and submits the week when it's done. The approver opens that week and sees every entry and its note, then approves it or sends it back with a comment. Managers see hours and amounts, never a screen.
That puts the evidence where reading leaves it: in the note. A note saying which document was read, and which sections, tells an approver more about an hour than a count of mouse movements does. If the job needs proof of input, the three tools above sell that, and Winnows doesn't.
Settings to read before a reader's week goes through any tracker
- What counts as activity. If it's keyboard, mouse and scrolling, a page read without scrolling counts as nothing.
- How long before quiet becomes idle, and how low the setting goes. Apploye's floor is 5 minutes. WebWork counts every full minute. Ango Hub's field goes down to 5 seconds.
- Whether another tab counts. In Ango Hub, switching to another browser tab normally starts idle timing at once.
- Who gets asked. Apploye's "Don't Ask Member" skips the worker. WebWork's recovery can be switched off.
- Where refused minutes go. In Apploye, rejected idle time is left out of payroll.
Import your Harvest account and read the reconciliation
Free for 2 people and 1 active project; $9 per active member per month after that, no usage fees on anything. The import runs on the free plan.