A General Task (which you might know as AUX codes or AUX states) lets you track time for activities or tasks that happen outside of Zendesk. General Tasks typically include things like lunch, breaks, meetings, training, and QA.

• Create General Tasks
• Categorize General Tasks
• Set up group permissions
• Calculating Productive General Tasks
• General Task locations

Create General Tasks by following the steps below:

1. Go to Admin. 
2. Click on General Tasks.
3. Click Add General Tasks on the top-right of the screen
4. Add as many General Tasks as you’d like and click Save
5. You’ve successfully set up your General Tasks 

You can add a subtask, edit, or delete a General Task by clicking on the icons located on the right side of each task. Just hover your cursor over the right side of each General Task to make the icons appear.

Note: 
- We recommend assigning a different color to each General Task. To do this, click on the color box to the left of each task’s name.
- You can easily reorder your General Tasks within Tymeapp by clicking on the Reorder button on the top-right of your screen and dragging and dropping the tasks in whatever order you prefer.
- Only numbers, letters, spaces and these special characters + * . : _ - are allowed for the General Tasks names. Characters like parentheses () are not allowed in the naming of General Tasks.

Categorize General Tasks

Once you’ve created General Tasks, you should categorize them by type. These categories determine how Occupancy Rate, Paid Time or Productive Times are calculated. If you find you need to change a setting later, no worries. The changes will retroactively apply to your reports.

Here are the categories you can use:

• Unproductive Time
  This is or General Task time where Productive Time is not selected.
  
• Exclude from Occupancy
  This would be an unpaid activity. Things like lunch fall under this category since the time is unpaid but still needs to be tracked.
• Productive Time
  This category is for activities that are on-par with support related tasks. For example, if an agent needs to work on social media management, you can add a task for it and track it as Productive Time.

Note: Remember, unproductive time isn’t bad – it’s a fact of support life. Things like attending training sessions need to happen, but they aren’t a core focus of an agent’s job. That’s why they fall under this category, even if they are necessary activities. 

Set up group permissions for General Tasks:

To set up group permissions, click “Available for All Groups” and then select the groups you want to allow to use the General Task you just set up. 

General Tasks are accessible to all groups by default, but you can restrict General Tasks so that they are only available to certain groups (agents' default Zendesk group).

How Tymeshift calculates Productive General Tasks:

Tymeshift calculates Productive General Task time as the Sum of all time an agent tracked in a General Task where the Productive time was selected.

General Task locations

• Your agents will be able to clock into General Tasks right from their Zendesk page.
• Managers will be able to see the time recorded in Agent Activity. You can even include General Tasks as part of your intraday schedule when creating Locations for your teams.