In DeskTime, apps and websites are categorized in two ways. For quick insights into productivity, there’s the app productivity level which will show you how much time of the day was spent using productive, neutral, and unproductive apps. But if you want even more granular insights about the device usage, you can use App categories.
This feature will sort all tracked apps and websites into specific categories, allowing you to see how much time was spent on each. These categories can be set up by Company Owners and Company Administrators (read more about user roles here). Device usage breakdown by category will be displayed on each user’s My DeskTime page, showing how much of their time was spent on each app category on a bar visualization.
In addition to the pre-made categories, you can create your own. By default, DeskTime will already assign many widely known apps and websites to their respective categories (i.e. TikTok = Social Media, or Outlook = E-mail), but any entry without an assigned category will go to Undefined. It is recommended that you categorize your most widely used apps and services to gain the most accurate insights.
Changing the category of an app
Head to Settings -> App Categories. In this section, you will see a list of the most used apps and websites in the selected period (day, week, month), total time spent across the entire company, and their categories. You can use the search bar to find a specific entry by name, filter them by category, and sort the list in your preferred order.
You can change the category of an entry by pressing Change category. You will see a pop-up in which you can use the dropdown list to assign the entry to your desired category. The list will contain all available categories (defaults and your custom categories). An app or website may have only one category at a time.
You can also assign the same category to multiple apps or websites at once.
- Use the checkbox to select all entries that you want to modify. You can also press Select all to quickly select all visible entries in the current view.
- Press the Edit icon in the top right corner of the list.
- Choose the category that you wish to assign from the dropdown list.
- Press Update and the categories will be changed for all the selected entries.
Pre-made categories
By default, DeskTime has six app categories. These categories cannot be edited or deleted. They are designed to cover most use cases, and all entries will be sorted in the following categories (unless you manually assign an app or website to a specific category):
- E-mail (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail)
- Social Media (e.g. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram)
- Office apps (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
- Entertainment (e.g. Netflix, Hulu, Spotify)
- News (e.g. Wall Street Journal)
- Undefined (any new app or website that has not yet been categorized by an Owner or Administrator)
Custom categories
If you want to categorize entries in a more specific way (e.g. Client Meetings, Development Project X, or Research), you can create custom categories. Press the Manage Categories button, which will reveal a panel where you can edit all categories (except the default categories).
To create a new category, simply enter your desired category name in the text box on the top and choose its color. Pressing the + button will add it to the list of available categories, and you can start assigning entries to it as described above.
Here, you can also modify your existing custom categories–choose their colors, edit their names, or delete them. Changes will be saved instantly (when creating or deleting categories) or upon closing the popup (when editing category names), and as a confirmation, you will see a notification toast in the bottom left corner of the DeskTime website.
For each category, you can choose a specific color using the color picker. These colors will affect the appearance of category labels in the App categories screen and they will also be used to visualize the time distribution per category in the bar chart that appears in the user’s My DeskTime page. We recommend making sure that multiple categories do not share similar colors.