Apploye measures both activity and productivity. Activity tells you how much keyboard and mouse input there was while someone tracked time. Productivity tells you what that time was spent on. They answer different questions.
Activity
Your activity percentage is the share of tracked time that had keyboard or mouse input. If someone tracked 8 hours and there was input totalling 6 Hours, their activity is 75%.
Activity doesn't know which app the input went into. Typing in a work document and scrolling a social media site count the same.
You'll see activity in reports such as Time & Activity, and on screenshots. Activity Levels in Apploye covers it in detail.
Productivity
Productivity is part of the Activity Insights add-on. Every app and website is labelled Productive, Unproductive, or Neutral.
Tracked time is then split by those labels:
- Productive: time in apps and sites labelled Productive.
- Unproductive: time in apps and sites labelled Unproductive.
- Neutral: time in apps and sites you've labelled Neutral, time in apps and sites that aren't on the list.
Productivity doesn't look at how much someone typed or clicked. An hour in a productive app counts as productive whether the activity was 30% or 90%.
An example
Say Maya tracks 8 hours on Tuesday and her activity is 70%.
An older version of this article would have called that 5.6 hours of productive work (70% of 8). That isn't right. Activity only says there was keyboard or mouse input during about 70% of those 8 hours.
The Productivity report shows where the 8 hours went:
| Time Label | Details | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Productive | Figma and Notion, which Apploye labels Productive | 5h 30m |
| Unproductive | YouTube, which Apploye labels Unproductive | 30m |
| Neutral | Apps that aren't on the list | 2h |
| Total | 8h |
Her 70% activity and her 5h 30m of productive time are both true. They're just measuring different things.
It works the other way too. Someone can be 90% active on YouTube. Someone else can be 40% active while reading a long document in a productive app, because reading doesn't need much typing.
Two different kinds of "neutral"
Apploye already uses Neutral Time on the activity side. There, it means tracked time with no keyboard or mouse input.
The Neutral level in Productivity is a different thing. It's time spent in apps and sites that aren't labelled Productive or Unproductive. A minute can be active and still fall under the Neutral productivity level.
Which one should I look at?
Use both. They're good at different jobs.
Look at productivity when you want to know what the day was spent on. For example, how much of the week went on the work you hired for, or which sites take up the most unproductive time across the team.
Look at activity when you want to know how engaged someone was with their computer during tracked time. A sudden drop, or a day at 100% with nothing to show for it, is worth a closer look.
Look at both together when one doesn't make sense on its own. Low activity with high productive time usually means reading, reviewing or calls. High activity alongside a lot of unproductive time means the person was at the computer, but on things you don't count as work.
If activity looks too steady to be real, check Unusual Activity. It flags mouse jigglers, auto clickers and other tools that keep activity up while nobody is working.
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