Your screen goes to sleep. Slack marks you Away. Your manager notices. Sound familiar? Screen timeout is the single most common reason remote workers get flagged as inactive, and most people don't realize it's happening until their boss asks why they were "offline" for 20 minutes in the middle of the day.
Here's the problem: the apps you use for work — Slack, Teams, ClickUp — all tie their presence status to operating system activity signals. When your OS reports that the user has been idle, those apps immediately flip your status to Away. You don't have to close anything. You just have to stop moving your mouse.
Why you can't just change your power settings
The obvious fix is to change your screen timeout in System Settings (Mac) or Power Options (Windows). Set it to "Never" and you're done, right?
Not if you're on a company-managed machine. Most corporate laptops have IT-enforced power policies that override your preferences. You can drag the slider to "Never" and it will snap back to 5 minutes the next time Group Policy refreshes. Your IT department locks this down for security and compliance reasons — they need screens to lock after inactivity to protect company data.
Trying to work around IT policy can itself get you in trouble. So that path is off the table.
What actually controls the idle timer
Your OS maintains a system-wide idle counter that increments every second you don't touch the keyboard or mouse. When that counter hits your screen timeout threshold, the display sleeps and the lockscreen kicks in. Every app on your computer reads this same counter to decide whether you're active.
The implication: if something generates genuine mouse movement, the OS resets the counter to zero. It doesn't matter whether the movement came from you or from a process running in the background — as far as the OS is concerned, the user is active.
The options ranked by risk
Physical USB mouse jigglers
These are small USB devices that present themselves as a mouse and wiggle a cursor in a fixed pattern. They work — in the sense that they do move the mouse. But they're trivially detectable: they show up in your USB device list, they move in perfectly regular geometric patterns, and IT can see the device inventory. Several companies have already fired employees specifically for using them.
Changing OS power settings manually
Works on personal machines. On managed corporate laptops, settings are overridden by Group Policy within hours. High risk of IT policy violation if you're circumventing an enforced setting.
A virtual mouse jiggler (software)
A Chrome extension that dispatches real pointer events in the browser — the same events that fire when you actually move your mouse. The OS sees genuine HID activity and resets its idle counter. No USB hardware involved, nothing in your device inventory, no regular patterns that stand out to monitoring tools.
This is the approach that works on managed machines because you're not touching OS settings at all — you're just generating activity through an app (Chrome) that's already allowed on your machine.
What about "Keep awake" browser flags?
Chrome has an experimental flag that can prevent the browser from going idle. This affects only certain browser-specific behaviors, not the OS-level idle counter that Slack and Teams read. It will not keep your presence active.
The right mental model
Think of it this way: Slack and Teams don't monitor your mouse directly. They ask the OS "is this user active?" and the OS answers based on its idle counter. Your goal is to keep that counter from ever reaching your timeout threshold. The cleanest way to do that without violating IT policy is to generate browser-level activity that the OS counts as real.
That's precisely what a virtual mouse jiggler does. No hardware, no settings changes, no IT policy violations.