Monitask

for one user, screenshot-heavy tools usually create more noise than value. Monitask and Time Doctor can do it, but the free tiers tend to get limiting fast once you want decent reports or reliable app tracking. if the goal is just basic employee tracking software and work tracking software, I’d keep it lightweight. if you eventually need something more compliance or workforce monitoring oriented, CurrentWare is closer to that lane, but for a solo setup I’d honestly start simpler and see if screenshots are even worth the friction

If you didn’t already have something in place, there’s no real way to go back and accurately verify those hours now tools like Hubstaff or Monitask only track from the moment they’re installed, so retroactive proof just isn’t a thing. In such situations it comes down to whatever logs you do have O365 activity, emails, commits, file changes etc. and whether there’s any actual output to support the claim. For the future it might be worth putting a lightweight tracker not even for micromanaging, but just to avoid these kinds of disputes. Something simple that logs active time or app usage can save a lot of back-and-forth later. You could look at something like KeepActive prev Kickidler for tracking activity and work hours, gives you detailed logs and even screen history. Might be overkill depending on how strict you want to go though. If you just need basic tracking something lighter like Hubstaff might be easier to roll out.

There are plenty of solid tools. You can pick based on whether you want productivity tracking or security monitoring. * ActivTrak- clean dashboards with productivity insights * Hubstaff / Time Doctor- simple tracking (apps, websites, time) * Insightful (Workpuls)- good mid-size option, easy to use * Monitask / DeskTime- budget-friendly basics For your size (200+ employees): * Go with ActivTrak or Insightful for visibility Also, you shouldn't just monitor. Focus on useful signals (apps, websites, behavior), not overload. Many teams quit these tools because of too much noise.

the panic attack feeling is universal in the first 90 days and it's actually rational -- you're not getting anxious because you're a control freak, you're getting anxious because you genuinely don't have a system for the visibility you used to get for free by being the one writing the code. monitask isn't the right tool because the problem isn't whether they're working, it's whether the work is on track. those are very different questions and conflating them is what makes early founders feel toxic. what tends to actually work for the first 90 days: 1. daily 15-minute async standup, written. not a call. 3 questions: what i finished yesterday, what i'm doing today, anything blocking me. slack thread or notion doc, due by 10am. forces them to articulate progress in their own words. the ones who are stuck will reveal it in how they describe "today" -- vague answers like "continuing work on the X feature" three days running is your signal to dig in. specific answers like "i'm pairing with sarah on the auth refactor and aiming to push the migration script by EOD" are the green flag you're looking for. 2. PR-based gates instead of time-based gates. rather than "how is it going," agree on milestones tied to PRs they'll open by specific dates. "by wednesday EOD i should be reviewing your draft PR for the X module." if no PR shows up, that's a real signal, not a vibe. and reviewing draft PRs (even when they're not ready to merge) gives you the visibility you need without having to ask "is it done yet." 3. 30-min weekly retro on the work itself, not the people. what we shipped, what slipped, why. not blame -- pattern detection. you'll learn quickly whether they're slow on a specific kind of work, whether requirements were unclear, whether scope crept. this is the conversation that builds your delegation muscle long-term. 4. the deadline next tuesday specifically. don't optimize for the long-term system right now -- optimize for the next 5 days. ask each dev to send a screen-share or loom every 24 hours showing what they have working. it's invasive for a sustainable system but appropriate for an emergency deadline. then back off after tuesday. 5. on the trust signal -- monitask and similar tools genuinely will damage trust because the message is "i don't believe you." the alternatives above all have the message "we ship together as a team and i need to see the work to do my part." very different. the first project after hiring is always the worst because you have no track record with them yet. by month 3 you'll have a feel for both of their patterns and the anxiety drops a lot.

You're asking the right question before pulling the trigger! That already puts you ahead of most managers who just deploy these tools and wonder why morale tanks. The core issue with tools like Monitask is they give you raw activity data (screenshots, keystroke logs, idle alerts) and leave you to figure out what it means. Most managers don't have time to review all that, and the data doesn't actually tell you who's performing well or where the bottlenecks are. The underlying need is totally real though. Wanting visibility into how your remote team is doing is literally your job. The problem is the *method*, not the goal. I work at Intelogos and I genuinely love what we've built here. We take similar underlying data but instead of dumping raw logs on you, our AI turns it into actual KPIs like productivity scores, engagement levels, and focus time. So you get the visibility you need without having to micromanage or stare at screenshots all day. Happy to answer any questions if you're curious!

My Daily Note page is a very detailed, dynamic page, which has taken me awhile to build. Here's what I have, top down: 1. [Frontmatter includes custom tags](https://i.imgur.com/l0BZzae.png), calculated with some functions in the note for 'current pulse of the year' (JIRA pulses), and Habit tracker tags [kikijiki Habit tracker](https://github.com/kikijiki/obsidian-habit-tracker). I added my own [custom visualization](https://i.imgur.com/KPaGRPg.png) of the Kikijiki data per-day and per-month. 2. In the body of the note, I have a "Word of the Day" using dataviewjs, using Wordnik via their API. That [looks like this in my note](https://i.imgur.com/BkRo2Ot.png), right at the top. 3. Next, I read and parse a custom JSON file I export from our company's LDAP directory, which shows me the birthday and anniversary for colleagues in my team and our sister team. That [looks like this](https://i.imgur.com/ZwBy7kJ.png) in my Daily Note page. I use this to give my team karma in our internal chat system to celebrate their anniversary or birthday. It's a great reminder that we're not all just a heads-down-work-only team. 4. Now continuing down, I have my daily journal prompts, to help me focus and set intention for my day. Currently, those are: * What is your intention for today? * What are the top 3 priorities for today? * How can I make today 1% better than yesterday? * What were my notable wins from yesterday? * How did I manage my time yesterday? * What is 1 step can I take today to align with my long-term goals? * What one thing will make today "complete"? I stole some of these ideas from [Ali Abdaal's Journalling Hub Notion page](https://aliabdaal.notion.site/Journalling-Hub-6cdcfe87dc9b45d5a990b78201ed4f7a), he mentioned in one of his streams. 5. Next, I have my [1-3-5 system tasks](https://www.monitask.com/en/blog/master-your-task-management-how-the-1-3-5-rule-revolutionizes-to-do-lists), actual checkboxes, which I populate each morning with the top 1, medium 3 and low priority 5 items I need to accomplish for that day. Those [look like this](https://i.imgur.com/Y9tRka3.png) in my Daily Note. 6. Below that, my note has another dataview visualization that looks back over the previous 14 days of note pages, for _incomplete tasks_, that is, items in my notes that are checkbox items that are not marked completed. It carries those over into current notes, until I complete them. That [looks like this](https://i.imgur.com/jpFgYJ7.png), and I have a link to the date of that note, so I can jump there for context. 7. Below that, is my [Timekeep block](https://i.imgur.com/UvvYqge.png), which includes time I sync from my [Toggl timers](https://track.toggl.com/) into Timekeep, [using this Obsidian extension I wrote](https://github.com/desrod/obsidian-toggl-to-timekeep). I've never written an Obsidian extension before this, so it was a fun learning exercise. I've been using Toggl for many, many years. I have it tied to NFC tags to start/stop timers with a single tap of my Android phone, as well as a recent timer start/stop button on my Streamdeck, using Bitfocus Companion. I use the Toggl API (v9) to query, set, start/stop timers, by reading the existing projects and tags, populating a popup dialog with dropdown menus including those projects and tags, when I press the button on my Streamdeck. 8. Below that, is the [Habit Tracker summary table](https://i.imgur.com/KPaGRPg.png) mentioned in 1. above. 9. Lastly, is a section that includes all notes created today and notes touched today. Simple visualizations: ### Notes created today ```dataview List FROM "" WHERE file.cday = date("2026-03-28") SORT file.ctime asc ``` ### Notes last touched today ```dataview List FROM "" WHERE file.mday = date("2026-03-28") SORT file.mtime asc ``` My Daily Note page is very clean and minimal. It's a single pane of glass for me. Along with TaskNotes and the Google Calendar tab in my Obsidian instance, I rarely have to jump out elsewhere to capture anything or review anything. Feel free to ask me any questions. I'm happy to answer any you might have!

Good find on Monitask. For what it's worth I got tired of the Toggl plus Wave juggle too and ended up building my own thing. [Invoiceabill](https://invoiceabill.com) has a floating timer that stays on screen wherever you are. One click start and stop. Hours tie directly to projects and invoices so there's no exporting between apps. No offline mode though so it wouldn't solve the storm problem. But if you ever want to drop one of your two tools instead of replacing one with another, might be worth poking around.

Both of those tend to put the real features behind the paywall once you care about screenshots or “proof of work.” Monitask is simpler but I’ve also seen it lag or skip captures, and Time Doctor feels pretty limited unless you’re on a paid plan.  If it’s just you, I’d lean toward something lightweight that still lets you do manual entries as a fallback, because auto-tracking glitches happen and having a backup saves you headaches. When I wanted that kind of setup without the heavy surveillance vibe, Buddy Punch was a good middle ground for basic tracking + clean reports. I’d still trial each for a few days since screenshots can be super OS and security-setting dependent.

Work for a big insurance company, fully remote support queue. Last week, management rolled out a new productivity initiative. They installed tracking software called Monitask on our work-from-home setups to monitor our adherence. The main metric they're obsessed with now is idle time. If your mouse and keyboard aren't moving for more than 5 minutes, you get flagged. The problem is, half my job is reading dense, complex knowledge base articles to make sure I don't give a customer the wrong policy information and get the company sued. But according to this new software, sitting still and reading for 10 minutes to solve a complex issue is the same as being away from my desk. My supervisor literally told me in our one-on-one yesterday that I need to jiggle the mouse while I'm reading so the timer doesn't flag me lol. They're incentivizing us to look busy instead of actually solving the customer's problem correctly. My AHT is going up because I'm terrified to spend the time I need on research. Has anyone else's center rolled out this kind of metric? I feel like I'm losing my mind.

Am I crazy, or is this completely insane? I'm an AM at a B2B SaaS company. Our data team built an incredible internal dashboard that auto-generates QBR decks. It cut deck prep time from 10+ hours to 15 minutes. Last month, our new VP of Sales saw one and decided the branding looked ugly. He has officially banned the entire CS department from using it. They are now back to spending hundreds of hours a month manually copying and pasting screenshots into PowerPoint. I'm thinking of running a pilot where I track my team's active time in PowerPoint vs. the dashboard using Monitask. I need undeniable data to show the CFO that this one VP's opinion is costing us thousands a month in wasted labor. Is this a common level of inefficiency in other B2B companies?

Feeling like an absolute idiot right now. I've been so focused on client work (I'm a freelance copywriter) that I completely dropped the ball on my own admin. I was just using a notepad to jot down hours and invoicing at the end of the month. I just reconciled my accounts and realized I forgot to bill for at least 20 hours of revision work for my biggest client over the last quarter. I literally just forgot. That's over a thousand dollars I just lit on fire because I'm disorganized. I know I need a proper system but I get so overwhelmed. What's your dead-simple process for tracking time when you're wearing 10 hats at once? Do I need something like Monitask that just runs in the background and logs what I'm doing so I can piece it together later?

I’ve been a Scrum Master for a remote agency for about 8 months. Our tech stack is pretty standard: Jira for ticketing, Slack for async, and Monitask running in the background strictly for our external client invoicing (we bill clients hourly). The problem is my Product Owner. He has fundamentally misunderstood what a Story Point is. Instead of treating points as a measure of effort and complexity, he is actively cross-referencing our Jira boards with the background hourly trackers. If a dev finishes an 8-point story but only logged 10 hours of active time on their timesheet that week, the PO confronts them in retro and asks why the point estimation was inflated. He is literally trying to find a mathematical conversion rate of 1 Story Point = X Hours. It is completely destroying our estimation process. The devs are now terrified during sprint planning and are starting to artificially pad their time trackers just so the PO doesn't yell at them for over-estimating complexity. I have explained to him five different times that points are abstract and time is literal, and they shouldn't be compared. He just points to the client budget and says, ""we need to know how much a point costs."" Has anyone successfully dealt with management weaponizing capacity tools against agile estimations? How do I get this guy to stop treating Jira like a payroll system?

Hey guys. Running into a massive workflow bottleneck with my tech team on enterprise-level site migrations (1M+ URLs). I recently did a deep dive into our own internal audit process because our project scoping was getting completely out of hand. I asked the team to run Monitask on their workstations for a specific two-week sprint just so I could get a baseline of where the actual hours were bleeding out during the initial discovery phase and it turns out, my technical analysts weren't actually analyzing. They were spending 15+ hours per client just fighting Excel. They were trying to manually VLOOKUP massive Screaming Frog crawl exports with raw server log files and GSC API data. Excel was just freezing, crashing, and eating entire afternoons.I asked why they weren't using the Python/Pandas script we built for this. They said the script kept throwing errors on their local machines when trying to merge dataframes larger than 2GB, so they abandoned it and went back to chunking CSVs in Excel. I need to rewrite the pipeline so they can just dump the raw logs and SF crawls into a folder and let it process. For those of you doing heavy log file analysis on massive JS-heavy sites: are you processing this locally by chunking the Pandas dataframes, or have you entirely moved this workflow into BigQuery/Google Cloud? I really need to get my team out of data-wrangling hell and back to actual technical SEO.

I run a small post team mostly doing youtube and some corporate social stuff. For the longest time we did a flat rate per video, but a few months ago clients started taking massive advantage of that. They'd send over 4 hours of unscripted rambling raw footage and expect us to carve a 10 minute narrative out of it for the same flat price. To be fair to my remote assistant editors, I switched them all to an hourly rate so they wouldn't get screwed by bad clients. It seemed like the right move but now I'm dealing with the complete opposite problem. I just got an invoice yesterday from a newer guy who billed 22 hours to cut a 12 minute talking head video. There was no heavy motion graphics, no multicam syncing, just basic A-roll pacing and some lower thirds. I can cut the exact same format in about 3 hours. I was freaking out about the budget so I asked him to start using monitask for the next few projects just so I could see the active application logs. I really didn't want to because forcing time trackers on creative people feels like a corporate sweatshop vibe and I hate it. But the data showed he wasn't actually working 22 hours, he was just leaving Premiere Pro open in the background while watching Twitch and playing games and running the clock the entire day. I don't want to micromanage my team but my margins are way too thin to eat a 22 hour invoice for a standard YouTube cut. For those of you managing other remote editors, how are you structuring pay right now? Are you doing day rates with strict output expectations or just capping the hourly limit per project?

Tax season is approaching and we are relying heavily on remote, seasonal preparers this year (about 15 contractors) to handle the overflow 1040s. In the past, we've had issues with contractors inflating their hours on complex returns, which eats directly into our firm's realization rate. We need a way to verify the time spent actually inside Lacerte/QBO without having a manager breathing down their necks on Teams all day. We're rolling out Monitask to the contractors this year. We aren't doing it to be malicious, we just need the screenshots and idle-time tracking as an objective baseline to justify our billable hours to the partners. For firm owners utilizing offshore or remote seasonal help: how do you handle time verification? Is this standard practice now, or do you just pay per-return to avoid hourly tracking altogether?

Hey guys. Been freelancing full-time (mostly UI/UX and Webflow dev) for about 5 going 6 years now, and I've recently started sub-contracting some of the overflow work to a part-time VA. For the longest time I used Toggl Track for my hourly clients. It used to be great, but lately it feels like it takes me 5 clicks just to set up a project and start a timer properly. Plus, adding my VA to the account pushed me into a pricing tier that felt ridiculous for what is essentially just a stopwatch. I looked at Harvest too, but it's so heavy on the invoicing side and I already use Wave for that. I tested a bunch of stuff over the weekend and ended up moving our workflow over to Monitask. I honestly thought it was just one of those intense corporate employee-monitoring tools (which I refuse to use), but you can configure it to just be a dead-simple start/stop timer for specific projects. Two big reasons it actually stuck for me: Offline tracking: My internet dropped for like 2 hours yesterday during a storm and the desktop app just kept running and synced my hours automatically when the connection came back. Toggl used to completely glitch out on me when that happened and I'd have to guess my billable time. The Paranoid Client feature: I have one legacy client who is super old-school and demands ""proof of work"" before paying his monthly invoice. With this new setup, I was able to turn on the screenshot feature only for his specific project code to keep him happy, while keeping it completely turned off for my VA and my other clients. Just wanted to share in case anyone else is feeling the software bloat right now and wants something lighter. What are you guys using for your hourly billing these days? Did I miss any other alternatives?

I’ve been the Scrum Master for our core platform team for about two years. We went fully remote in 2024, and recently our sprint velocity has absolutely tanked.During standups, devs were just saying still working on ticket X for four days straight. A 3-point user story was taking an entire two-week sprint to clear. Management totally freaked out. The CTO wanted to force a heavy surveillance tool onto the team's laptops. I fought him tooth and nail over it. Putting keystroke loggers on senior engineers violates the core of agile trust. It's factory-worker mentality. We eventually reached a compromise with a much lighter tool called Monitask. it just tracks high-level app usage (like IDE vs Slack vs Chrome). We noticed that devs were context-switching into five different side-projects a day because the Product Owner kept DMing them with urgent favors and quick bug fixes completely outside of the sprint backlog. I'm glad I found the root cause and told the PO to back off, but having to use a background tracker to prove a workflow problem feels like a massive failure of our agile process. How do you guys protect sprint velocity and enforce boundaries when you can't physically see the team?

I’m running a remote team of 6 Customer Success Managers. Our entire retention model is built around doing Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with our Tier 1 enterprise clients. At the end of Q1, I pulled the Salesforce reports and noticed our QBR completion rate was at an abysmal 30%. I checked the team's timesheets, and everyone was logging their full 40 hours a week. I confronted the team on our weekly sync, and the consensus was that "prepping the data for the QBRs takes forever now." It didn't make sense. We have an automated dashboard that exports the deck in five minutes. I felt like a corporate stooge doing it, but I partnered with IT to roll out Monitask to audit their daily workflow. I just needed to see what applications were actually eating up their day. The tracking data showed that nobody was using the automated dashboard. They were spending 4 to 5 hours a day manually rebuilding PowerPoint decks from scratch because one rep convinced the rest of the team that the automated template looked ugly. They were literally wasting half their week on formatting slides instead of talking to clients. So I fixed the process, but the team is now super resentful that I audited their app usage. How do you guys measure CS productivity when they work from home? Do you track their actual daily hours and app usage, or do you ignore their schedule and just manage them strictly by their account churn rate?

I have been studying productivity analytics tools to use in our team, and one thing I have continued to observe is that many companies that started with Insightful eventually start seeking alternatives. Insightful is a good employee monitoring and activity tracking tool, however, after some time of using it, some limitations begin to appear. A common complaint that teams have raised is that the analytics can be somewhat superficial. You receive activity data, screenshots, and time logs, but it does not necessarily translate into actionable productivity insights that managers can take action on. Flexibility is another issue, as not all teams can report and customize as much as they desire to get more workforce intelligence or more specific productivity measures. Scalability and pricing may also be an issue as teams expand, particularly when you are attempting to use the platform beyond monitoring. Due to this, numerous teams begin to consider Insightful alternatives that extend beyond mere monitoring and emphasize more on productivity intelligence and workflow insights. **Time Champ** is one of the options that continue to emerge. It is not merely a surveillance tool but rather a workforce intelligence platform. It offers productivity analytics, task insights, and work pattern analysis, which may assist managers in knowing how work actually gets done instead of merely monitoring activity. **Workpuls Core** (the light version some smaller teams use) is another tool that some smaller teams are experimenting with. It is more productivity-oriented and employee activity-oriented, but with a less complex configuration that is effective with expanding teams. Another alternative that I have heard of in smaller SaaS and remote-work circles is **Monitask**. It is lighter, yet it provides activity monitoring and productivity visibility without being too complicated. In the case of teams that have been using Insightful primarily as a monitoring tool, a change to a platform that focuses on productivity intelligence and actionable insights can be significant.

Just venting but also need a reality check. I’m juggling like 5 client ad accounts right now and my brain is completely fried. I’ll jump into Meta ads for Client A, get an urgent Slack message from Client B, jump into their Shopify, fix a tag, and completely forget to switch my Toggl timer. By 5 PM I'm just staring at a blank timesheet trying to guess my hours. I'm definitely underbilling because I feel guilty overestimating. I literally can't do the manual start/stop stopwatch thing anymore. My ADHD won't let me. I had a thought today, like what if I just run a background app that silently logs my active windows? That way at the end of the day I can just look at a timeline and piece together my timesheet based on what URLs I was on. I looked at RescueTime but it feels too focused on productivity scores which I don't care about. Someone else mentioned Monitask, it looks a bit corporate but apparently I can just use it as a passive app logger to see ""oh I was in Client B's ad account from 1pm to 2:30pm"" and then fill out my invoice from that. Do any of you do this? Just run a passive logger on yourself so you don't have to remember to click a button every time you switch tasks? I feel like I'm leaving hundreds of dollars on the table every week just because my working memory is garbage.