Time Tracker not counting accurately

[a93cc0d8]

Hi  Upwork,
I noticed something new recently. My time tracker no longer tracks the time if my keyboard is not active. Lost more than an hour in total of not logged time while I was actually working and time tracker was on yesterday and today I noticed the same thing. Why is this? Note that in my line of work, I run codes which sometimes require time to run before proceeding with next tasks from my clients. While my codes are running, I am sitted watching and waiting for an output

[ArjayM]

Hi Zubair,

Your current session time displays to the left of the ON/OFF toggle switch. It looks like a stopwatch that counts the time since you turned to log ON. Please refer to the Today and This Week counts in the app (or your Work Diary) to confirm your time billed. This stopwatch doesn't consider the Work Diary’s 10-minute segments or that you may have gone idle while logging time. We only invoice time segments with uploaded user activity, and every segment with activity will be billed so that some rounding may occur.

Choose View Work Diary near the bottom left side to review what we’ve uploaded and make adjustments if needed. Choosing This Week will take you to this week’s timesheet report. Feel free to check this help article for more details on how to effectively log in your time with the time tracker.

[a93cc0d8]

That's exactly what I just explained. My work requires me to go idle when running codes and waiting for replies. Sometimes it might be a meeting that I'm in, sometimes I might be watching loom videos to take note of new tasks. All these times are not recorded and pile up to a huge sum. It was not like this before till recently.

In such a case what do I do?

[JoanneP]

Hi Zubair,

You might want to discuss this with your client. You and your client may consider a Fixed- Price contract or use the manual time option whenever needed. For more information, please check out these help articles:

Fixed Price Contracts

Add Manual Time

[hoyle_editing]

Zubair,

I have a similar problem from time to time, sometimes I am required to watch a length of video for example. Or render large video files that take time. 

Its a bit of a poor design, and Upwork should at the very least allow the client to switch off activity tracking and rely soley on time/photo tracking. 

The way I get round it is, I generally have a couple of screens switched on, if im doing something that requires no input, then on my second screen i will occasionally type a couple of words in notepad (Im currently rendering a large file) for example! the app then records those keystrokes and bills. Its a pain but works.(even just dragging a few windows around the screen should register mouse clicks/input)

Also, with more long term clients I have recently started using manual hours more, my client and I know how long the tasks take, and that when im working on his tasks thats all im doing, so i just bill manually. (though you obviously loose protection this way, so i'd only recommend doing that if you trust your client)