Productivity roles

What is a productivity role, and how do you change one?

It is a list that says which applications and websites count as productive, neutral or non-productive — for one kind of job.

It is not a permission

A productivity role changes no access. It opens no screen and hides none. It only changes how time is scored.

The thing that decides what somebody can open is their role on People and roles. Two different ideas, similar words, and the confusion costs new admins an afternoon.

Open Productivity rules (/settings/productivity) → Roles and applications.

The board is the whole feature. A card’s column is its category, and a badge on each card says whether this role set it or whether it is inherited from somewhere wider.

Why one list for everybody fails

LinkedIn is work for a recruiter and a distraction for a developer. Instagram is work in a creative studio and a distraction in a bank. Figma is work for a designer and noise for an accountant.

A single company-wide list gets one of those two groups wrong, and the first report they read tells them so. That is how a rollout loses the room in week one.

Making one

Press Add roles. You get the starter templates — ready-made lists for common jobs — and the option to create an empty custom role. Tick the ones you need, rename them to your own job titles, and create.

Four roles usually cover a company. Twelve is a list nobody maintains.

The board

Select a role and you get four columns: Productive, Neutral, Non-productive, and Unclassified when anything is waiting.

Drag a card between columns, or use its Move to menu. Select several with the checkboxes and move them together.

Card badges tell you where a rule came from:

Badge	Meaning
Override	This role sets it explicitly
Inherited fallback	It comes from a wider rule or a built-in default
Unclassified	No rule matches. It counts towards nothing

Dropping a card into Unclassified resets it to whatever it would inherit.

Neutral is a real answer

Not everything is productive or distracting. Search, email and calendars are usually neutral, and marking them productive flatters every number you have — including the ones you will later show somebody.

Saving, and what saving does

Changes are a draft until you press Save changes. A role with unsaved edits shows an amber dot in the list on the left.

When you save, the product recalculates the last 31 days of reports in the background. A fix repairs the recent past, not just tomorrow.

Two messages are worth recognising:

Normal

“Saved changes. Activity for the last 31 days is being reclassified in the background.”

The rule is live and the recent reports are being rebuilt. Give it a few minutes before you check a figure.

The one to act on

“Saved changes, but the background reclassification worker is offline. Historical reports for the last 31 days were not recalculated and still need retrying when the background worker is online.”

The rule is saved, but the old reports still show the old scoring. Anybody reading a productivity figure right now is reading the pre-fix number with no sign that it is stale.

Press Retry refresh when the worker is back. Until then, do not quote a productivity figure at anybody.

Assigning people

Press Assign. Two tabs: Teams and Employees. Bulk-select and Apply to selected handles a group at once.

The order of precedence is worth memorising:

1. A role set directly on a person.

2. The role set on their team.

3. The built-in defaults.

An employee set to “Inherit from team” follows their team. A team set to “None (Built-in fallback)” falls through to the defaults.

The dialog warns you: “Assignments update the last 31 days of productivity reports within a few minutes.”

Somebody else may be editing at the same time

Save an assignment that another admin has already changed and you get “Assignments were updated by another administrator. Please reload to review.” Your change is not applied. Reload and redo it — do not assume it went in.

The other actions

Action	What it does
Rename	A draft until you save
Apply template	Replaces or merges with a starter template
Duplicate	Copies the rules. Not the people or teams
Delete	Blocked while anybody is assigned. Reassign them first
Copy to role	Copies classifications across. Unclassified items are refused

Duplicate is the one that catches people: the new role has every rule and nobody in it, and will stay empty and silent until you assign somebody.

Two limits

500 rules per role

Past that you get “This role has 500 rules. Please remove or reset existing rules before adding new ones.”

If you are near it, your list has stopped being a policy and become a catalogue. Use a wider rule on Apps and websites instead of another hundred cards.

Only a tenant admin can edit. Managers and auditors can read the board and use the tester, and nothing more. They see “Only tenant admins can add new rules.”

What to check after you build one

Open App and website use and read the Uncategorized tile. That figure is the only honest measure of whether your roles are doing their job.

Next: How something gets called productive · Alerts and goals