Reference
How the score works
What the Productivity Score measures, where the 70/40 color bands come from, and the honest limits of reducing a workday to one number.
What the score is
The formula, in one sentence: the share of a person's active tracked time spent in apps or sites classified Productive — Neutral and Distraction time both count against it equally, and idle time is not counted at all.
Worked example. An 8-hour shift produces 6.5 hours of active tracked time — the remaining 1.5 hours is idle (60+ seconds with no keyboard or mouse input) and drops out of the calculation entirely, not counted as a zero. Of the 6.5 active hours: 5.0h is classified Productive, 1.0h Neutral, 0.5h Distraction. Score = 5.0 ÷ 6.5 × 100 = 77.
The bands
Three colors, two cut-offs, defined once in the code so the dashboard, the PDF export, and this page can't drift apart:
| Band | Score | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Green | 70–100 | Most active time was classified Productive. |
| Amber | 40–69 | A mix — often Neutral-heavy rather than actively unproductive. |
| Red | 0–39 | Most active time was Neutral, Distraction, or both. |
77 from the example above lands in green. The same person on a meeting- and research-heavy day — 1.0h Productive, 4.5h Neutral, 1.0h Distraction of the same 6.5 active hours — scores 15: solidly red, for a day that may have involved zero goofing off. That gap is the subject of Honest limits, below.
Where classifications come from
Every sample — one executable or browser host, captured every 10 seconds — resolves to Productive, Neutral, or Distraction through a fixed precedence. First match wins:
- A rule you've added for this tenant — an executable or, for browser activity, a site host, set under Classifications → Classified → Add a rule. It overrides everything below, including our own catalog.
- For browser activity: the curated site catalog, then cross-tenant consensus (next), then a general content-category list — limited to its highest-confidence categories (adult, gambling, games, social networking, and similar), not its full opinion.
- Our curated app catalog's default for that executable.
- Cross-tenant consensus, for an executable or site the catalog doesn't know: when three or more tenants have independently classified the same value and at least 80% agree, that verdict fills the gap for tenants who haven't ruled — it never outvotes a tenant rule or the catalog.
- Still nothing: Neutral.
None of it is fixed. Add or change a rule any time from Classifications → Classified, or work the Pending queue — individually or in bulk. Deleting a rule reverts every event for that app or site, past and future, back to whatever the catalog, consensus, or content list would have said without it.
What doesn't move the number
- Idle time. Dropped from the denominator entirely — see the worked example above. Time tagged as pure system chrome (the lock screen, the Start menu, installer noise) is dropped the same way.
- Keystrokes, clicks, mouse distance. Logged and shown elsewhere in the dashboard as activity counters, but the score has no input-count term in it — only which category a sample's app or site falls into.
- Screenshots. Stored separately for spot review and never read by anything that computes a score.
Honest limits
A day spent on legitimate work that happens to classify Neutral — research, spec reading, time in a line-of-business tool the catalog has never seen — scores the same as a day spent scrolling. The arithmetic can't tell deep research from deep scrolling; only a person looking at the actual activity can.
The score measures a person against their own tracked time, not against a teammate's — there's no peer ranking or percentile in the number itself. Adherence, the figure usually sitting next to it, compares hours worked to the shift schedule instead — a different question, easy to conflate with this one.