Idle, locks, and meetings

Idle timeout

If you don’t touch the keyboard, mouse, or trackpad for a while, Vetroscope stops counting active time until you’re back. How long it waits is set in Settings → Activity Tracking → Idle timeout — 5 minutes by default, and you can make it longer.

While you’re idle:

• Active tracking pauses and no time accumulates.
• Background time keeps counting, so music and videos that are playing are still recorded.

Meetings and calls

When you’re on a call that uses your microphone (Zoom, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Slack), Vetroscope can tell you’re there even though your hands are off the keyboard, and keeps counting the time. A meeting where you only listen and speak won’t show up as a hole in your day, and the call appears in Now Playing while it lasts. If a meeting still leaves a gap, you can usually dispute that idle time on the Timeline.

Locked screen

Locking your screen stops everything: no active time, no background music or video, nothing. The same applies when the computer sleeps.

If idle detection is incorrect

Sometimes you were there but not touching the computer — reviewing a cut, or reading a long document. If the same app or breakdown borders both sides of an idle gap of up to 90 minutes, right-click the idle region on the Timeline and choose Dispute idle time to fill it. There’s a matching tool for the opposite mistake — Dispute time block removes short blocks, like when your computer wakes up overnight. Vetroscope collects those blocks for you under the Timeline’s Alerts bell. Both are covered in Timeline.