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Tracking and blocking are two different things. Tracking records where time went. A plan stops or limits particular applications and websites. Most organisations use ReclaimTime for tracking alone and never create a plan.
Blocking is off unless you turn it on. It requires Enable Plans on the person’s account and a plan assigned to one of their groups. Neither is set by default for a tracked employee.

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How a plan reaches a machine

  1. An enterprise admin creates a plan in Plans.
  2. The plan is assigned to a group on the Plans tab of that group’s panel in Workforce.
  3. The client asks the server for the plans that apply to its user’s groups, and refreshes that roughly every two minutes.
  4. The client enforces the plan locally, so it keeps working when the machine is offline.
Because assignment is by group, moving somebody between teams changes what is blocked for them, with no per-person configuration.

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What a plan can do

A plan has to be started to do anything. A plan that exists but is stopped has no effect, which is a frequent source of “we set up blocking and nothing happened”.

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Before you turn blocking on

Blocking is visible to employees in a way that tracking is not. A tracked employee normally sees nothing at all, whereas a blocked one gets a closed tab or a message. Whatever consultation your organisation needs for monitoring, blocking is a separate conversation, and it is worth having it before the first plan starts rather than after somebody’s browser closes on them.
Practical points:
  • Start with notify rather than block. Seeing what would have been blocked for a fortnight is cheaper than discovering a false positive on a work tool.
  • Watch the allow-list mode. Blocking everything except an allowed set is easy to get wrong, and getting it wrong stops people working.
  • Blocking does not change tracking. A blocked site still produces activity, and if it is not on the corporate list it is still anonymised.

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What is not here yet

There is no per-group simple block list in the dashboard, and no alert when somebody exceeds a threshold on a blocked or unproductive target. Both are planned. Today, blocking means creating a full plan and assigning it to a group.
Checked against ReclaimTime client 8.0.0.9 and dashboard V3 on 5 September 2026.