How to Customize Idle Time Settings in Hubstaff for Your Team’s Real Workflows

Hubstaff’s idle detection feature can help you understand where your team’s time goes — but it’s far from the only indicator of productivity.

Different roles and job responsibilities can look quite different when distilled into keyboard and mouse activity. Sales teams may sit idle, trying to close deals over the phone, while content creators are often glued to their keyboards.

These nuances mean that the default configurations won’t fit every workflow out of the box.

Hubstaff gives you control over how it interprets inactivity, and this guide will walk you through configuring Hubstaff’s settings around the way your team works.

Hubstaff defines idle time as the absence of keyboard and mouse activity, not as the absence of work. The idle timer triggers when input stops for a set duration.

Here’s what Hubstaff does not do:

• Record screens
• Log keystrokes
• Monitor content

When the idle timer is triggered, it simply means Hubstaff knows that keyboard and mouse input have stopped. It does not (and will not) know what you were doing at the time when it happened.

Before any idle time is discarded, the user sees a warning prompt. They can choose to keep the idle time in their timesheet, discard it, or reassign it.

Hubstaff’s idle time settings can be configured by navigating to the general settings panel on the Hubstaff dashboard. Settings apply to your organization by default, but you can override them at the project level if needed.

How to access the settings

Idle time settings are available on the Grow, Team, and Enterprise plans. On Grow, the behavior is fixed to Prompt. The ability to switch to Always or Never requires Team and above.

You can find them by navigating to Settings → Activity & Tracking → Timer & Tracking → Keep Idle Time.

The three org-level behaviors

Inside the menu you just navigated to, you will find three options:

• Prompt. When a user returns from idling, Hubstaff asks whether to keep or discard that time. The decision is in the employee’s hands by default.
  
  
• Always. Idle time is automatically recorded without prompting. This works well for roles where gaps in input are routine.
  
  
• Never. Idle time is automatically discarded. This fits roles where genuine inactivity must not be logged or billed, and where continuous engagement is the expectation.

The setting you select here becomes the baseline for your entire organization. From there, you can refine by adjusting the timeout threshold or applying different rules to specific projects.

Idle timeout threshold and auto-stop

The idle window and auto-stop are idle time controls that may appear confusing.

The timeout window defines how long the input must be absent before Hubstaff considers someone idle. On the other hand, the auto-stop behavior occurs after that threshold is crossed.

• Timeout window. This is how long before idle triggers. For roles with natural gaps in input, a short window is likely to constantly generate false positives. Extending it gives those roles room to work without the tracker interpreting every pause as absence.
  
  
• Auto-stop timer. This is what happens when the threshold is crossed. When enabled, extended idle stops the timer entirely instead of just flagging the time. In strict billing contexts, this is very useful. But for development, research, or async roles, it might be a better idea to set this conservatively.

A good starting point is a longer timeout window paired with auto-stop disabled. You can always tighten from there based on what the data tells you.

As mentioned earlier, the default setting doesn’t account for the fact that every role looks different in terms of activity. The table below reflects the most common patterns by role. You can use it as a starting point to configure your own company-specific settings.

Some work patterns trip idle detection more reliably than others, and knowing where the tool is likely to misread your team’s day makes it easier to configure around those moments.

Meetings

Video calls don’t generate mouse or keyboard input, so Hubstaff may flag them as idle under default settings. Inaccurate time adds up quickly for teams with heavy meeting schedules.

Here are ways to handle this:

• Set affected users to “Always” so meeting time is kept without prompting.
• Coach the team to pause and resume the timer around calls.
• Log meeting time as its own project and disable idle time.

Each approach has tradeoffs.

“Always” is lower-friction but less precise, while a dedicated meeting project takes more discipline but gives you better control over where time goes.

Deep focus, reading, and research

Developers in terminal sessions, QA specialists reading through documentation, and design work involve tasks that typically do not generate trackable input.

Add to the fact that, in our Workstyle Report, we found that 53% of the workday on average is used as focus time, and you’ll see how core work may be misread by incorrectly configured idle detection.

Here are some ways to handle it:

• Set these roles to “Always” so focus time is kept without prompting.
• Extend the idle timeout window to reduce false positives during long input gaps.
• Coach the team to reassign flagged time to the right project after the fact.

For deep work roles, “Always” is always the lowest-friction option. An extended timeout gives more flexibility without fully automating the decision.

Hubstaff does not discard idle time without warning.

Before it removes anything, the user gets an alert so they can decide what to do with the idle time. They can keep it, discard it, or reassign it to a different project.

Admins can audit the idle time sessions. On the other hand, users can manually edit time entries after the fact.

Hubstaff will give its users the data, but it is the team that ultimately decides what to do with it. It flags what it sees, but it can never make judgment calls about how productive a pause in work was.

While idle settings are easy to configure, it's easy to forget to explain them.

Taking a quick moment to address idle time in your onboarding process can be more important than it sounds, because small frustrations stem from team members not understanding why their time tracker behaves the way it does.

Fortunately, you can get ahead of that with a few simple steps:

• Document your idle settings in your team handbook alongside your broader tracking policy.
• Explain the reasoning behind each setting, as people are more likely to trust a system they understand.
• Let the team know they can easily adjust settings if the defaults do not match their workflow.
• Treat the initial configuration as a starting point instead of a permanent policy.

The settings matter less than the explanation you provide for them. A team that understands why idle time is tracked the way it is is less likely to raise objections, which results in more accurate data.

Idle settings are a calibration tool. They should be configured to align with how your team works so it can provide data you can rely on. Start with the defaults. Everything after that is yours to adjust.

If you see the value in idle time tracking but aren’t sure how to get started, your workflows deserve flexibility. Set up your ideal idle time rules today with a free, 14-day Hubstaff trial.