Keep your Teams and Slack status from going away

Microsoft Teams and Slack mark you as Away after a few minutes without mouse or keyboard input — about five minutes by default. That is a presence feature reacting to your computer's idle timer, not a judgement about your work. Here is why it happens, the settings you can change, and what actually keeps the dot green.

Why Teams and Slack show you as Away

Both read the same thing: how long it has been since your computer last saw real input. Step away from the keyboard, and after a short idle period your status flips from green to yellow on its own.

• Microsoft Teams has no built-in "always available" switch. You can set a status message, and staying in a call or meeting keeps you active, but once the computer is idle Teams returns you to Away.
• Slack lets you set yourself to active or away manually, but it still flips to Away automatically after a stretch of inactivity.

In both apps, the setting ultimately keys off real input — so a status message alone does not hold it.

The settings that help, and their limits

A few things genuinely reduce the flip-to-Away:

• In Slack, Preferences lets you control some presence behaviour, and being in a huddle keeps you active.
• In Teams, keeping a meeting window open, or resetting your status, helps for a while.

But none of these is a permanent "stay green" toggle, because both apps fall back to the idle timer. That is the thing to understand: presence follows real input, not a preference.

What actually keeps your status green

The only reliable way to keep a presence indicator green is real input events that reset the computer's idle timer — a mouse move or a key press.

This is where a common mistake happens. PowerToys Awake does not keep Teams or Slack green. Microsoft describes it as telling Windows the machine needs to stay in a certain power state — but it presses no keys and moves no mouse, so the idle timer that presence reads keeps counting, and your status still goes Away. Keeping the screen on is not the same as being active, and this catches a lot of people.

Caffeine for Windows works differently. Its own page says it simulates a keypress every 59 seconds (the F15 key by default), and a simulated keypress does reset the idle timer. It is one key on a fixed timer, though: no mouse movement, and nothing that starts when you step away or stops when you come back.

An activity app that produces natural mouse, keyboard and scroll input resets the idle timer, so presence stays active. That is what Stayaway does.

When this is reasonable, and what it does not do

Keeping your status active makes sense for the moments you are at your desk but not typing: a long call where you are listening, focused reading, a presentation on screen, or a short step away to refill a coffee.

Be clear-eyed about the limit, though. It keeps the status dot green. It does not change anything else your teammates or your employer can see, and it is no substitute for actually being reachable. If your computer is also running monitoring software, read can mouse jigglers be detected — the honest answer is that an activity tool does not hide your screenshots or app logs.

How Stayaway handles it

Stayaway keeps your Windows computer active with natural mouse, keyboard and scroll activity. Auto Detect starts a run on its own once you have been idle for a threshold you set, and Smart Resume stops the instant you move the mouse or type again — so it never fights you for control. Mouse activity is free; you can download it and try the rest.