Active time vs. productive time — drawing the line
Most tools collapse 'at the keyboard' and 'doing the work' into a single number. We think that's the source of most bad arguments.
Pick any popular time tracking dashboard and look at how it reports activity. Most show one number per person per day. That number is some weighted mix of keyboard activity, mouse movement, and active-window dwell time. Whatever the formula, it's labelled something authoritative-sounding like 'productive hours.'
The problem with one number
Two engineers can have wildly different "active" numbers and ship the same amount of work. The first spends most of her time in IntelliJ; the second spends his in conversations with the team, occasionally typing. By any keyboard-activity metric, the second one is half as productive. By any output metric, they ship at the same rate.
What Huble does instead
Huble distinguishes "active time" (time at the keyboard, on the project) from "tracked time" (time the engineer says they were working on the project). Both numbers are reported separately. Neither is called "productive." The framing means managers reading the dashboard have to actually look at output to draw conclusions — which is the only honest way to read time data anyway.
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