Productivity Trends, available in all ActivTrak plans, provides valuable insights into your team's work habits. It can help you boost employee productivity across your organization by understanding work patterns, tracking productive time, and ensuring adherence to schedules.
To access Productivity Trends, navigate to Workforce Management > Productivity Trends.
Tip: Add Productivity Trends to your Favorites for quick access.
This dashboard utilizes Live Data
This dashboard is powered by ActivTrak's Live Data, which shows real-time information as it happens with updates every 2-5 minutes. For a complete explanation of how Live Data differs from Insights, see Understanding Live Data and Insights.
Contents
*User Time Zone support in Productivity by User is available in Early Access beginning March 31, 2026, to select accounts. We plan to make this available to all accounts soon.
When to use Productivity Trends
Productivity Trends shows how your team spends their time throughout the workday, helping you:
- Evaluate work patterns and productivity trends
- Identify opportunities to improve focus and reduce distractions
- Monitor schedule adherence and working hours
- Track Offline Meetings and work locations
Note: Anything set to the Ignore category inside Settings > Classifications will be excluded. You can read more about this feature here.
Navigating Productivity Trends
Filter settings
Productivity Trends can be filtered by user, group, and time range using the drop-down filter menu options at the top of the dashboard. After making your selections, click the Refresh button to ensure they are applied.
Productivity chart
The Productivity chart displays the overall productivity of users, computers, or groups over a specific time period. It provides two views: Summary and Detailed. Use the toggle in the top left to switch between them.
In both views, the Activity types are color-coded for easy analysis:
| Productive (teal) | Activities classified as productive work |
| Unproductive (purple) | Activities classified as unproductive |
| Undefined (gray) | Activities not yet classified as productive or unproductive |
| Offline Meetings (peach) | Time spent in scheduled meetings involving non-digital work |
The Detailed view will break down the activity types into Active and Passive:
| Active (darker shades) | Time where the user is providing input to the computer via keyboard and/or mouse |
| Passive (lighter shades) | Time without active keyboard and/or mouse input |
Hover over the data in the chart to see the exact amount of time spent on each category; click on the legend to remove or add specific classification types from the chart.
Schedule Adherence features
Productivity Trends now includes Schedule Adherence capabilities, which allow you to define when employees are expected to work and compare this with their actual working hours.
This visual representation displays an aggregate of each user's activities for that day. Select to view your data against either the Saved schedule (i.e., the Work Schedule you created in Settings > Schedules) or select Quick entry to set the following:
| Schedule start | The time at which the work day begins |
| Schedule end | The time at which the work day ends |
Note: These schedule settings will persist when you return to the dashboard, so you don't need to enter them each time.
Location is displayed next to a user's name, indicating where the user worked during a given time period: Remote, Office, Remote/Office (a combination of remote and office locations), or Unknown (location cannot be determined).
Note: Offline Meetings and Location data (if enabled) will not show for the current day.
When you enable Strict Mode, any time interval that includes unproductive activity will be marked as Unproductive. In addition, any time interval that includes passive activity will be marked as Passive Time when the Detailed View is selected.
Because the interval aggregation method is based on the predominant activity during that period, the chart provides a high-level view of the day and will not precisely match the calculations at the top of the dashboard. For example:
- If your interval is set to 30 minutes and a user was productive for 18 minutes before logging out, the entire 30-minute block will appear as "productive" in the chart (green) because productivity was the dominant activity (60% of that interval).
- However, the actual calculations count only the exact 18 minutes of productive time.
The larger the interval you select, the greater the potential discrepancy between the visualization and the precise calculations. This visualization approach allows for effective pattern recognition while maintaining accurate time calculations in your dashboards.
Reporting in User Time Zone mode*
*User Time Zone support in Productivity by User is available in Early Access beginning March 31, 2026, to select accounts. We plan to make this available to all accounts soon.
When User Time Zone mode is enabled under Settings > Time Zone, Productivity Trends reflects each monitored user's local time zone. Each user's metrics are calculated using their own local midnight-to-midnight day boundaries rather than the account's. This improves accuracy for distributed teams by ensuring each user's daily totals reflect when they actually worked.
For more information on enabling User Time Zone mode and managing user time zones, see the Time Zone Settings article.
Practical applications
Work pattern analysis
Use Productivity Trends to understand when and how work gets done:
- Identify the most productive times of day for individuals and teams
- Discover patterns in unproductive time that may indicate distractions
- Monitor passive time to ensure accurate tracking of work activities
- Analyze offline meeting time to understand non-digital work demands
- Verify that teams are adhering to expected work schedules
Remote and hybrid work monitoring
The location data in Productivity Trends helps manage distributed teams:
- Track where team members are working each day
- Compare productivity patterns between office and remote work
- Ensure compliance with the company's remote work policies
- Make informed decisions about office space and resource allocation