Every time tracker eventually meets the same request: can it tell me how productive people are? An activity percentage, a focus grade, a green-amber-red bar next to each name. It's easy to build, it sells to managers, and some well-known tools lead with it.
Hourbrook doesn't have one, and won't.
What a score measures
A productivity score in a time tracker is almost always built from input: keystrokes and mouse movement per minute, time in “productive” apps versus “unproductive” ones, idle minutes. Some tools add screenshots every few minutes so a manager can look.
Think about what that misses:
- Reading a spec. Thinking about a design before drawing it. A call where you mostly listen.
- Watching an AI agent work through a task you gave it, ready to stop it. Waiting on a twelve-minute build.
- Sketching on paper. A walk to untangle a bug.
All of that is work, and all of it looks like idleness to a keyboard counter. Meanwhile, what scores well is what looks busy: switching windows, typing, keeping chat in front. A score doesn't measure productivity. It measures how much someone looks like they're working, to a sensor.
What people do when they're scored
People are good at learning what a system rewards. When a tool docks you for sitting still, you learn not to sit still. You keep a window moving, you avoid the long think, you pad the timesheet afterwards to make up for the minutes the tool took away. Then everybody knows the numbers are a bit wrong, and nobody says so.
That's the heart of it: a tracker that's unfair to the person using it produces numbers nobody can trust, including the manager who wanted the score. When the tool counts the coffee between two pieces of work as part of the work, people stop gaming it, and the hours on the invoice are the hours that were worked.
There's a plainer reason too. Screenshots and keystroke logs capture things that are nobody's business: a bank page, a doctor's portal, a private message, sometimes a password on screen. A time tracker doesn't need any of it to know which project you worked on.
Our five rules
These are written into how Hourbrook is built, not just how it's described.
1. Breaks count
A coffee or a think between two pieces of the same work stays in the work. You choose how long a break may be: 15 minutes, half an hour, 45 minutes or an hour. Longer time away ends the stretch, and Hourbrook can ask what it was. A call on your phone or a whiteboard session gets logged; a break is a break.
2. Waiting on an agent or a build is work
While Claude Code, Codex or something in a terminal is busy, sitting still is still work, for up to three hours. Hourbrook judges this by whether those processes use the CPU, never by what they do. Calls count too, however long, and a full-screen video or slideshow keeps counting for up to an hour.
3. Rounding goes your way, and you can see it
A stretch you pick from your day is rounded out to the quarter hour: 13:10 to 15:46 logs as 13:00 to 16:00. The log card says how much was rounding and which breaks were joined. Nothing is added that you didn't see, and nothing is taken away.
4. No scores, no idle deductions, no “last active”
No productivity score, no activity percentage, no focus grade, no ranking, no idle time taken off. We removed a “last active” field on purpose. Team views show capacity and what was logged and planned.
5. What it sees stays with you
Hourbrook never takes screenshots or records keystrokes. Apps, window titles and web addresses stay in a database on your Mac. A team sees the entries people chose to log, never the activity behind them. Details on the privacy page.
What we gave up
Saying no to scores has costs, and we'd rather name them.
- We're harder to sell to some managers. A dashboard of percentages demos well. “Your team will log honest hours” demos less well.
- We don't promise stopwatch numbers. Generous breaks and outward rounding mean a day logs a little more than a stopwatch would. We think that's closer to the truth of a working day, and the log card shows every minute that was added, so you can take it out.
- Some setups require monitoring. If your industry or contract requires screen monitoring of staff, Hourbrook isn't the tool, and won't become it.
One more rule for ourselves: when we change how days are drawn and drafted, we judge the change by fewer fixes, not by minute error. If people correct more entries afterwards, it's worse, even if it's more exact.
Where this is a real trade-off
Not everyone who uses activity monitoring acts in bad faith. Some agencies bill hourly to clients who ask for proof; some remote teams went through a bad hire. Those are real problems.
Our answer is different: make the record clear instead of making it watchful. Every logged entry says what it was, when it started and ended, and how its number was put together. If a client asks “what was this hour?”, there's a one-line answer that doesn't involve a screenshot of someone's desktop.
If that sounds like how you'd want to be counted, see how it works. If you run a team, there's a page for that, and the guide to tracking without screenshots shows how to check what any tracker records.