Basecamp shows presence. A row of clients active now sits in your workspace, each client's card marks them as active while they are in Workout Titan Coaching, and everyone else carries a last-seen time.
Hover or read the label and you get the detail: how long somebody has been online, or how long ago they were last there.
The row and the card badge tell you the same thing in two places. The last-seen time fills in for everybody who is not there now.
What it is genuinely good for
- Answering somebody while they are still there. A question answered while a client is in the app is worth several answered the next morning.
- Knowing not to change a program underneath somebody who is looking at it right now.
- Spotting the client whose last-seen is measured in weeks. That is the same signal the least-recently-active sort gives you, in a different place.
What it does not tell you
Whether anybody is training. Being in the app means the app is open, nothing more. A client can be online for twenty minutes reading their program on the bus, and someone else can complete a workout without opening it until the evening.
It is presence, not activity. Updates and engagement measure activity; this measures attendance. A last-seen time tells you when somebody was last there, not when they will be back.
Using it well
There is a version of this that feels like surveillance to the person on the other end, and it is worth staying away from it. Messaging somebody the moment they appear, or referring to when they were last online, reads as being watched, even when you meant it kindly.
Use it to time your own work, not to account for theirs. "Saw you were online, thought I'd catch you. How did Tuesday go?" is fine. "You haven't opened the app since the 14th" is a different conversation, and rarely the one you wanted to have.
If a client has genuinely gone quiet, the honest approach is to ask how they are rather than to present them with a timestamp.
The stats on a client card covers what the numbers beside a name count, and Reading the client grid covers sorting a whole roster by how recently people were there.