Who can use this feature?
- Available with Workforce.
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In Workforce, active time is a measurement of how long employees genuinely engage with their tools—capturing attention through actions like scrolling, typing, and clicking, not just whether a tab is open. This makes it well-suited for understanding real engagement, where the goal is to reflect how employees actually use their applications rather than how long those applications were loaded.
In this article:
- Active Time Calculation
- Active Time in Workforce
- Active Time in Analytics
- Frequently Asked Questions
Active Time Calculation
Active time is calculated by examining individual user events—such as clicks, keystrokes, scrolls, and mouse movements—and applying event-type-specific buffer windows around each event to estimate how much human attention was present. These windows extend a short period before and after each event to account for reading and thinking between interactions. Overlapping windows are merged without double-counting, and all buffers are cut off when the tab is hidden, the window loses focus, or the page ends. See How is active time calculated in practice? for a worked example.
Workforce tracks three related time measurements for each pageview:
- Active time: An estimate of genuine human attention based on the pattern of user events and their surrounding buffer windows.
- Focus time: The cumulative time the browser tab had operating system focus (the frontmost, active window).
- Visible time: The cumulative time the browser tab was visible and not hidden by another window or minimized.
These three values have a consistent relationship: visible time is always greater than or equal to focused time, which is always greater than or equal to active time.
Active Time in Workforce
Workforce surfaces active time across several views. The Apps overview includes an Active Time column showing aggregate active time per application across all employees. In the employee detail view, each application row shows that employee's Active Time, Focus Time, and Visible Time alongside pages viewed for the selected date range. The same three measurements appear in the app detail view, where the Employees table shows per-employee active, focus, and visible time for that application.
Active Time in Analytics
The three active time measurements are available as session properties in Fullstory Analytics. The properties Page active time, Page focused time, and Page visible time appear under Property aggregated by in the Metrics builder. To use them, the metric must include a Visited Page event.
Note: The older Time on page, Time on page active, and Time on page inactive properties continue to appear in other parts of Analytics—such as event refine-by filters in Metrics and Segments—and use the original calculation. Only the three new properties listed above reflect the active time calculation described in this article.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is active time calculated in practice?
Consider an employee who scrolls a page, pauses to read, clicks a link, then switches to another tab. Each action opens a buffer window that extends for a period before and after the event to account for the attention present around it. Buffer lengths vary by interaction type—a scroll carries a longer after-buffer than a click, reflecting the reading that typically follows.
The scroll's after-buffer and the click's before-buffer overlap during the reading pause—that overlapping span is counted once, not twice. When the employee switches tabs, all open buffers are cut off immediately; any remaining buffer time is discarded. The result reflects the continuous span of attention, not the sum of each individual buffer.
Is the new active time calculation available to Fullstory Analytics customers?
The new active time calculation is currently available only for Workforce organizations. It is not currently available in standard Fullstory Analytics accounts.
Why don't I see active time in my account?
During Early Access, the new active time calculation is enabled on a per-account basis. If you do not see it, reach out to your account team to discuss enablement.