Interruptions and breaks
These are two different things, and attrect keeps them apart. The difference is why some figures read oddly at first glance.
An interruption is not time off
The interruptions field on an entry answers one question only:
How long did this activity lie idle while it was running?
Not: how long you were not working. If you are at a concept and spend half an hour on the phone in between, that is half an hour of interruption to the concept — you worked the whole time.
Two things follow from this that would otherwise look like mistakes:
Entries may sit inside one another. A stand-up in the middle of a block of development work is the ordinary case, not sloppiness. The block carries the half hour as an interruption, and the stand-up stands beside it with its own half hour.
An interruption may be longer than the work. Two hours of concept work spread across a six-hour window is a perfectly ordinary day. attrect says nothing about it, because there is nothing to remark on.
In the form this is your job
Recording in the form, if you place an entry inside another, attrect points out that the overlapping time has to stand as an interruption in the other entry. That is handwork, and the notice is the only reminder of it. On the timeline it does not appear, because there the application works the interruption out itself.
A break is time off
Genuine breaks get a row of their own. The header of each day carries a Break button for it; it asks only for a start, a duration, and optionally a comment. On the timeline you drag one instead, with Shift held.
A break carries no project and no activity. It is not billable, appears in no evaluation and in no export, and counts towards no total of hours. What it does do is stand on the day, close a gap there, and push the next entry's suggested start behind it. On the timeline it interrupts the activity it lies inside, exactly like any other inner span:
A nine-hour window with 45 minutes of break leaves 8.25 net hours.
The statutory rest break
Because breaks and interruptions stand apart, attrect can check whether the required rest has been recorded:
| Working time that day | Rest break required |
|---|---|
| more than 6 hours | 30 minutes |
| more than 9 hours | 45 minutes |
These are the German figures, from § 4 ArbZG. Which ones apply follows from the place of work, not from the company letterhead: working time law goes by where the work is done. Somebody habitually working in Vienna for a company seated in Cologne is under the Austrian AZG, which asks 30 minutes from six hours with no second step (§ 11 AZG); Switzerland has 15 minutes from 5.5 hours, 30 from 7 and an hour from 9 (Art. 15 ArG).
So the place of work sits on the person: administration can set it per account — as it does the working days — and whoever leaves it empty works where the company sits. The company's seat in turn is set by the holiday import. Where neither the person nor the installation says, attrect says nothing about the rest break rather than checking against German figures that would be wrong elsewhere. The regions on offer today are the German federal states, which all lead to the same figures — the other countries need their own holiday rules first.
Two things § 4 asks that attrect does not check: that no more than six hours of work run without a break, and that each part of a split break lasts at least 15 minutes. Three ten-minute breaks add up to a satisfied half hour here; in law they do not.
Where the recorded breaks fall short, attrect points it out on saving. It is a notice, not a barrier — whether the rest was taken is a fact about the day, and a recording that refuses to hold an inconvenient fact has stopped being a recording.
Without a break row the check says nothing
On a day with no break recorded at all, the notice stays silent. Not because the day is fine, but because it says nothing: while breaks are optional, a missing row means "not recorded", not "not taken". If you want the check working for you, record your breaks.
What goes into the export
Exports serve invoicing. Break rows are not in them. The Pausen (Minuten) column of the CSV carries the interruptions — and those are the useful number when an export goes to a customer as a record of working time. The employment-law side stays internal.