What activity logs should answer

Activity logs should answer three legitimate questions: how much time is going into different categories of work, whether work patterns are sustainable, and whether there are efficiency opportunities worth investigating. They should not answer: what was this person doing at 2:14pm on Tuesday, or how does this person's second-by-second behavior compare to the person at the next desk.

The right review cadence

Activity logs lose their value when reviewed too frequently. Daily log reviews create surveillance anxiety and produce meaningless data (one day's log tells you almost nothing about patterns). Weekly team-level log reviews are the right cadence for most managers — enough to see trends without granular surveillance of individual moments.

The discipline of aggregation

Always start with aggregated data before drilling into individual data. If aggregate focus scores are declining across a team, investigate at the team level (what changed this month?) before drilling into individual logs. If you investigate an individual log first, you are almost certainly looking for a person to blame rather than a system to fix — and you will probably find what you are looking for, even if it is not real.