What is a good activity percentage?
Updated on 6 July 2026
There is no universally good activity percentage, because the metric does not measure work. Tracking vendors calculate it from keyboard and mouse input duration during tracked time, so it reports how often someone touched the input devices, not what they achieved. Treat any benchmark, including a high one, with caution.
How do tracking tools calculate the activity percentage?
From keyboard and mouse input, according to their own support documentation. The score does not read the work on screen; it checks whether the input devices were being used. The table below summarises how three widely used trackers describe their own calculation.
| Tool | How the vendor says the score is calculated |
|---|---|
| Hubstaff | The share of seconds in each 10-minute block with any keyboard or mouse input; keystroke content is never recorded (Hubstaff support) |
| Time Doctor | Keystroke and mouse-movement counts, converted to a percentage of time with activity; the keys pressed are never recorded (Time Doctor support) |
| Monitask | Input checks every 10 seconds, reported as the share of active checks across each 10-minute period (Monitask documentation) |
None of these calculations measures what was achieved while the input happened.
Why does the activity percentage mislead?
Because input frequency and useful work are different things. Reading a document, sitting in a call or thinking through a problem produces little input and drags the score down, while aimless scrolling pushes it up. Comparing scores across roles makes it worse: a developer reading code will always look less active than someone doing data entry. The number can also be manufactured. Mouse jigglers and auto-input tools inflate it, which is why the vendors themselves now sell countermeasures: Hubstaff's Insights add-on flags apps that generate fake activity, and Time Doctor's Unusual Activity Report detects artificial input patterns. When the companies that invented a metric ship tooling to catch people faking it, the metric is not proof of work.
What should you look at instead of an activity score?
At the work itself, not at input counts. ScreenJournal is an AI work visibility tool that reads on-screen work as it happens, turns it into a detailed timeline of what each person actually did, and then deletes the raw screen data. Timelines accumulate into a searchable chronicle of everyone's work history, and from them ScreenJournal generates timesheets and reports automatically and drafts standup summaries on request, answering questions about any of it in plain English.
Instead of a percentage, a manager sees a work timeline: scored entries with app badges, durations and plain-English summaries of what was actually done. For a direct comparison with the best known activity-percentage tool, see ScreenJournal vs Hubstaff.
Frequently asked questions
Is a low activity percentage proof that someone is not working?
No. The score only counts keyboard and mouse input, so reading, planning, calls and meetings all pull it down. Treat a low score as a prompt to look at what was actually produced, never as evidence on its own.
What activity percentage do vendors consider normal?
There is no universal benchmark. Some tools offer internal benchmarks (Hubstaff sells them in its Insights add-on), but each vendor calculates the score differently, so a number that looks low in one tracker can be typical in another, and comparisons across tools or roles are not meaningful.
See the work itself, not screenshots of it
Timesheets, reports and answers from the work your team actually did. Available for Windows and macOS, with Linux and mobile support coming soon.