In short
- Input, not elapsed time. The countdown advances only while you're typing or moving the mouse.
- Time away rewinds it. Recovery is credited back; a long enough absence resets the session.
- One value is read. How long ago your last input was — never what you typed.
The problem with wall-clock timers
A fixed 50-minute timer assumes every minute since you started is a minute of screen work. Real days do not look like that. You take a call and listen for half an hour. You read a printed page. You go to the kitchen, get pulled into a conversation, and come back forty minutes later.
A wall-clock timer greets you with a mandatory break you have already taken. Do that a few times and you learn to distrust the app — and once you're routinely dismissing a break because it's wrong, you'll dismiss the one that's right. Unfair timing is the mechanism by which strict break apps get uninstalled.
The inverse failure matters too. If the timer keeps running while you're away, it eventually fires during your lunch, "completes" a break you never saw, and hands you a fresh session at the exact moment you sit back down for another three-hour stretch.
How the activity timer works
- The countdown follows input. Keyboard and mouse activity advance the work session. Once you pass the idle threshold, it pauses.
- Idle time is credited as recovery. The countdown to your next break literally goes back up while you're away — the longer the absence, the more session you get back.
- A long absence resets the session. Lunch counts as the break it actually was, so you don't get interrupted five minutes after returning.
- State is on disk, every second. Written to a local SQLite file, so sleep, a reboot or a crash resumes the session instead of forgiving it.
That last point is deliberately unforgiving in the other direction: rebooting is a known way people escape strict break apps, and a timer that lives only in memory rewards it.
What it reads — and what it doesn't
The timer needs exactly one fact: how long ago the last input event happened. Windows exposes that directly. StopBurnout does not capture keystrokes, read window titles, categorise applications, log websites or take screenshots — not as a policy toggle, but because none of that is required to answer "are you still working?"
The practical consequence is that the whole product runs offline with no account and no telemetry, and your history stays in a file on your disk. That is covered in more detail on the local-only data page.
A timer you can actually trust
Activity-aware timing, enforced breaks on every monitor, and nothing leaving your machine. Free for 14 days.
Activity timing vs the alternatives
| Approach | What advances the timer | Fails when |
|---|---|---|
| Pomodoro timer | You start it manually | You forget to start it, or don't stop when it ends |
| Wall-clock interval | Time since the app launched | Meetings, calls and lunches trigger breaks you already took |
| Activity-based | Real keyboard and mouse input | You work on a second device the app can't see |
Every approach has a blind spot; activity timing's is that it only knows about this machine. If you routinely work from a laptop and a desktop at once, no single-machine timer will see your full day. For the more general comparison of timer philosophies, see Pomodoro vs a break enforcer and the research summary in ultradian rhythms and work cycles.
Common questions
Does a meeting count as work time?
Not once you pass the idle threshold. Listening on a call without touching the machine does not push you toward a break. If you're taking notes throughout, that input does count — you are using the screen.
Does the app record what I type?
No. It reads one value from Windows: how long ago the last input event occurred. No keystrokes, window titles, applications or websites are captured.
What happens if I take a long lunch?
Time away is credited back as recovery, so the countdown goes back up while you rest, and a long enough absence resets the session outright.
Does the timer survive a restart or sleep?
Yes. Session state is written to disk every second, so restarts, sleep and unexpected shutdowns resume rather than reset.
Can I change the idle threshold?
Yes, along with work and break lengths. In the locked protection levels those settings sit behind your password, so they can't be loosened mid-session.