Discrepancies between session and total time in UAT.

[roverup]

I'm really puzzled by the behavior of the Upwork Activity Tracker sometimes.

1: Upwork's preference for logging time in 10-minute blocks leaves me often unsure of how pausing a session will affect the time I've already logged. For example, if I've logged 3 minutes, get a phone call and pause the tracker, then resume again, does the following time get added on to the previous 3 minutes or am I starting over again, thus throwing out the 3 mins I logged before the phone call interrupted me? This is not clear in the interface for UAT. BTW a pause session button would be amazing. 

2: Speaking or things which may or may not cause my logged time to be thrown out, it appears as though deleting a screenshot forfeits some or all of the time logged during that period. Is this correct? If not, shouldn't users be warned of potential issues caused by deleting screenshots?

3: Other common total vs. session time discrepancies ... for example: today, after logging 14 minutes of work, my total session time was already up to 30 minutes. Why? The only thing that I can think of is that each screenshot counts for 10 minutes of work. Since they come at random times, it just so happened that for the first 14 minutes of my session, 3 screenshots had been taken. The timestamps in the Upwork Work Diary are 12:50, 1:00, and 1:10 pm, but this is not when those photos were actually taken. I really can't believe it would actually work this way, though. While perhaps there is a system in place which averages out the inherent inaccuracy of this behavior, it's just not good enough when I have to track time accurately down to the minute which is common with my clients. Since I can't be as detailed as I need to be with UAT, I usually stop tracking before I finish working in order to prevent overbilling people. 

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!

[AndreaG]

Hi Trevor,

When you have logging turned on, the app takes random screen captures six times per hour—once per 10-minute billing segment. Anything visible on your screen will display in your Work Diary, but you have the option, in Settings, to choose whether the screen captures your entire desktop or only the active screen. You can also choose whether you want to be notified each time a screen capture is taken. By default, notifications are on and you’ll have the option to delete the screen capture before upload if you’d like to.

You may delete screen captures from your Work Diary until the end of the weekly billing cycle. If you delete a screen capture in the desktop app or in your Work Diary, you also delete that time segment’s activity (meaning it won’t be included in your weekly invoice). This and more info about time tracking is available in this help article.