How to prevent DeskTime from going idle during online meetings?

When a DeskTime user doesn’t show any activity for a period of time, their DeskTime app will go idle. This means that when your employees are engaged in activities that don’t require them to interact with their laptop mouse or keyboard—like participating in an online meeting or watching a longer video—DeskTime will record this time as idle, even if they’re actually doing something productive. 

In these cases, they’ll have to go back and edit meeting times manually, which can be frustrating and time-consuming. 

Luckily, there’s a simple fix to prevent the DeskTime app from going idle at the wrong time. Here’s how it works.

When you enable Meeting & video time tracking, DeskTime will be able to read when your employees are engaged in an activity that prevents their computer from going into sleep mode (e.g., using online communication apps like Zoom, MS Teams, Google Meet, or video sites like YouTube or Udemy). DeskTime will then track their time on these apps as productive instead of idle. 

This will allow your employees to participate in online meetings or watch video tutorials without interacting with their laptops. 

Note! If you want to make sure certain apps like YouTube aren’t tracked as productive time, you can always set these apps as unproductive. 

 

How to set up Meeting & video time tracking

To set up Meeting & video time tracking, you have to be either the Company Owner or Company Admin. You can enable this setting for the whole company or for specific teams only. 

If you want to turn this setting on for the entire organization, head over to Settings > Account. 

Scroll down to Tracking settings on the right-hand side, and you’ll find the Enable [feature name] setting there. 

But if you want to enable it for a specific team, go to Settings > Teams. Select the team you want to enable this setting for and click Edit Teams. 

You’ll see the Enable Meeting & video time tracking setting on the right-hand side, under Tracking settings.

 

 
Minimum required DeskTime app version:
  • Windows version 1.3.661
  • Mac & Linux version 6.0.0-alpha.56