Slack marks you Away after 10 minutes. Teams does it after 5. If you're a remote worker who actually steps away from your desk, focuses for long stretches, or spends hours on Zoom calls, your status is frequently wrong — and that has real effects on how available you appear to your team.

Here's every method people use to stay active, ranked by how well they actually work.

Method 1: Moving the mouse manually

Reliability: 1/5

The obvious approach. Works perfectly — until you forget. The average deep-focus session lasts 23 minutes (according to University of California Irvine research on workplace interruptions), which means you need to interrupt yourself roughly twice every session to reset the timer. That defeats the purpose of focus time entirely.

Method 2: Looping a video

Reliability: 2/5

Some people leave a YouTube video or video file playing on loop. Since video playback can generate system activity events, this sometimes prevents the idle timer from firing. In practice it's inconsistent — it depends on whether your OS considers media playback "activity" — and it uses significant CPU/battery.

Method 3: AutoHotkey / keyboard macro scripts

Reliability: 3/5

Windows users can write an AutoHotkey script that sends a keypress or moves the mouse at a set interval. This works until: you lock your screen, the script window loses focus, you close the terminal, or Windows updates AutoHotkey. It also requires technical setup and re-doing every time you get a new machine.

macOS equivalent: a Keyboard Maestro macro or a simple AppleScript with a delay loop. Same fragility issues.

Method 4: Physical USB mouse jiggler

Reliability: 4/5  |  Risk: High

A physical jiggler plugged into USB sends movement at the hardware level, reliably. The problem is detection: it shows up in your company's device inventory log (every managed machine logs USB connections), and its perfectly regular movement pattern gets flagged by activity monitoring software. If your company uses Hubstaff, ActivTrak, or similar, physical jigglers are a liability.

Method 5: Changing Slack/Teams manual status

Reliability: 1/5 for presence dot

You can manually set a status in Slack or Teams — "In a meeting," "Available," whatever — but this does not affect the presence dot. The coloured circle next to your name is controlled entirely by idle detection, independently of your manual status text. It's a common misconception.

Method 6: Virtual mouse jiggler (Chrome extension)

Reliability: 5/5  |  Risk: Low

A Chrome extension that generates synthetic mouse events inside the browser. Since Slack, Teams, ClickUp, and most other remote work tools run in Chrome tabs, they receive these events and their idle timers reset continuously.

The advantages over every other method:

What about dedicated "stay awake" apps?

There are OS-level utilities — Caffeine for macOS, Don't Sleep for Windows — that prevent your computer from sleeping. These prevent screen lock and system sleep but don't necessarily generate the user-activity signals that Slack and Teams use for idle detection. They solve a different (though related) problem.

If your goal is specifically to keep your Slack and Teams status green, you need something that generates activity events — not just prevents sleep.

The 2026 verdict

For most remote workers, the combination that works best: a virtual Chrome extension jiggler for Slack/Teams presence, plus an OS-level keep-awake utility if you also want to prevent screen lock. Together they cover both layers of the problem without any hardware, IT policy risk, or manual intervention.

The key thing to avoid in 2026 is physical USB jigglers — endpoint management is now standard enough at most mid-size and enterprise companies that USB device logs are a real risk.