Compare a period with an earlier one

Put a person's day, week or custom period beside an earlier one of the same length, and see what changed at a glance.

Who this is for

Owners and managers looking at someone in the part of the organization they manage, and anyone looking at their own page. Viewing a teammate's figures needs the permission to read members' activity; your own figures are always yours to see.

Steps

1. Open the person's page: select their name on the activity board, or select View activity on their record in Team.
2. In the band at the top of the page, choose what to look at: Day, Week (Monday to Sunday, in UTC) or Custom (any stretch of up to four weeks). Move with the arrows on either side of the date, or open the date button to pick one. In Custom, set the two dates, or use a shortcut: 7d, 14d or 4 wks.
3. Open Compare and choose what to compare with:

• Yesterday or Previous day for a single day, Previous week for a week, or the previous stretch of the same length for a custom period (for example Previous 14 days).
• Same day last week for a single day, or One week earlier for a stretch shorter than a week.
• 4 weeks earlier, the same days four weeks back.
• Pick a start date…, then choose where the compared stretch starts.

1. Read the recap. Under each figure (Worked, Focus time, Productivity score, Idle, then Avg activity for a day or Active days for a longer period) you'll see how much it moved against the compared period. What changed sums up the biggest moves in a sentence each.

What happens next

• The compared period always has the same number of days as the one you're looking at. The current week, which runs up to today, is compared with the same weekdays of the week before, never with a full week.
• On a single day, the compared day is drawn as a dashed line over the Activity timeline. Over several days, Day by day shows each compared day as a dashed outline behind the same position, and each app in Top apps has its earlier share marked on its bar.
• A change too small to matter is shown with an equals sign in a neutral colour rather than as a rise or a fall. Meetings and breaks are reported without being counted as better or worse: meetings are work.
• Times per app in Top apps are estimates, marked ≈. The percentage beside each one is exact.
• Over more than one day, the Productivity score figure counts each day in proportion to the time worked that day, so a day with a few minutes of work barely moves it. A score based on under an hour of work says so under the figure. It is a wellbeing-aware heuristic, not a verdict on a person, and it should never be the only basis for a decision about someone's employment.
• The period and the comparison are part of the page's address, so copying the link shares exactly what you're looking at. Clicking a day in Day by day opens that day, and your browser's back button returns you to the period.
• Over several days, Screenshots shows one tile per day with how many were taken. Select a day to open its screenshots, or Review all to go through every day of the period, newest first. A day marked No screenshots had nothing captured.

If it doesn't work

• If you see "Not your data to see", the page explains: *"You can see your own activity, and anyone in the part of the org you manage."* Ask an owner if you need to see this person.
• If you see "Couldn’t load this period", select Retry. The line under the heading is the server's own reason, or *"The recap is unavailable right now."* when it gave none.
• If What changed says *"Much the same: nothing moved by more than a few percent."*, no measure moved enough to mention. The figures above still show the exact changes.
• Same day last week only appears for periods shorter than a week, and 4 weeks earlier doesn't appear for a four-week period, because each would be the same as the previous period or overlap the one you're looking at.
• If your plan limits how much history you can see at once, the recap says so (*"Your plan shows 7 days of history at a time, so this covers the most recent 7."*) and compares the same number of days on both sides.

Related

• Move the day you are looking at
• Look at a week or a custom period
• Open a day from the activity heatmap
• Review all screenshots for a week or period
• Read the day's headline figures and top apps
• The productivity score (overview)