Blog · 30 June 2026
The hours you spend attending an AI agent, and how to count them right
When you direct an AI agent and it runs for half an hour, you're working: reading the output, steering the next step. But your keyboard is still. Every activity-based time tracker reads that stillness as idle and skips the time. Here's how much attending time that really is, and how to count it accurately.
The simple math
Start with the scale of it. Time spent working in AI tools is the fastest-growing thing on the clock: a time tracker's own data, DeskTime's 2026 study of 50,000+ tracked users, found it on track to roughly triple year over year. The catch is what that growth is made of: much of it is the minutes you spend waiting on those tools, hands off the keyboard, which activity trackers write off as idle.
Independent data now puts a number on that overhead. Glean's 2026 Work AI Index, a survey of 6,000 workers co-authored with researchers at Stanford, UC Berkeley and five other universities, found people spend about 6.4 hours a week "botsitting" AI: feeding it context, checking its output, and switching tools. The report calls it "largely unrecognized, unbudgeted, and untracked" work. The slice of that where you are watching and waiting on a run, hands off the keyboard, is the attending time this piece is about, and it is the part activity trackers miss.
So how much billable attending time is that? It comes down to three numbers: the hours a day you spend attending agents, your hourly rate, and the working days in a month (about 21). The result is the time activity trackers can't see, and that's easy to forget on a manual timer:
| Attending / day | Rate | Attending / month | Attending / year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 h | $80/h | $1,680 | $20,160 |
| 2 h | $90/h | $3,780 | $45,360 |
| 3 h | $120/h | $7,560 | $90,720 |
| 4 h | $150/h | $12,600 | $151,200 |
At a middle-of-the-road two hours a day and $90 an hour, that's $3,780 a month, or $45,360 a year of attending time, uncounted on every other tracker.
Why every tracker misses it
Activity trackers decide you're working by watching for input. No input for a minute, and you're flagged idle, which is exactly what supervising a running agent looks like. Manual timers don't watch anything; they depend on you remembering to press start, and in the flow of directing an agent, you don't. Both were designed before "work" routinely meant a machine running on your behalf while you watch.
The fix: a third state
Counting all idle time would overcharge. The trick is to distinguish two kinds of stillness: attending a running agent (billable) versus beingaway (not). Atend adds that third state. It watches whether a known agent is running and whether you're present, counts the attending time, and leaves out the time you genuinely stepped out. This runs automatically, from metadata only, with no keystrokes or screenshots involved.
See your number
Atend reconstructs your real day automatically, including the attending hours.