Short answer: a timer that keeps ticking after someone walks away adds phantom time to timesheets. Auto-pause after a few idle minutes removes it, without anyone having to remember to stop the clock.
Almost nobody inflates their timesheet on purpose. They go to lunch with the timer on, take a call, answer the door, or close the laptop and forget. Each one is small. Across a team and a month, it reaches payroll and client invoices.
Where phantom time comes from
- Lunch or a tea break with the timer still running.
- Phone calls and meetings away from the keyboard.
- Walking away mid-task and coming back an hour later.
- Forgetting to stop the timer at the end of the day.
What auto-pause does
If there is no keyboard or mouse activity for a set time (5 minutes is a common choice), tracking pauses. When activity returns, it resumes. The idle gap appears in the timesheet as its own colour, so nothing is hidden and nothing is silently deleted.
What it should not do
It should not judge how busy someone is. Reading a long document, thinking, or sitting in a video call may involve no mouse movement and is still work. Set the threshold to catch absence, not concentration. Four to five minutes is a sensible start; raise it for roles with a lot of reading or calls.
How to roll it out
- Pick a threshold (start with 5 minutes).
- Tell the team what happens when it triggers.
- Let people add missing time through a request if auto-pause caught real work.
- Review the first month and adjust.
Idle time and fairness
Treat idle gaps as data about the tool, not accusations. If many people show long idle periods at the same time, the cause may be meetings or a slow system, not behaviour.
TrustHours auto-pauses when you're idle and shows idle time separately in every timesheet.
How missing hours work