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Insightful is the odd one out among trackers, and it works in your favour once you understand it. On most tools your score goes up when you move the mouse more. On Insightful, moving the mouse more does almost nothing. Your productivity percentage is decided somewhere else entirely: a settings page you've probably never seen.
So the single most effective thing you can do to raise your Insightful number has nothing to do with how you work. Here's the full picture, biggest lever first.
How Insightful actually scores you
Insightful (formerly Workpuls) sorts every app and website you touch into one of three buckets, then reports how your time split across them.
Productive time counts for you. Unproductive time counts against you. Neutral time is meant to sit out of the scoring entirely. Your productivity percentage is basically productive time divided by the total that gets scored.
The catch, and it's the whole game: your organisation decides which bucket each app goes in. Insightful ships defaults, but an admin can change any of them, and can set them differently for different teams. You are being scored against a classification you didn't make and can't see.
Audit your app labels before anything else
Start here, because nothing else comes close.
Picture a developer whose code editor is labelled productive but whose documentation site, terminal, and API reference are all sitting in neutral or unlabelled. They do excellent work all day and score badly, because most of the day happened in tools that don't count. No behaviour change fixes that. Only a label change does.
Ask your manager or admin for the productivity label list that applies to your team. When you find a core tool sitting in the wrong bucket, that's not you underperforming, it's a misconfiguration hitting everyone in your role who uses that tool. Raise it that way and it usually gets fixed fast, because it's obviously a settings problem rather than a complaint about you.
Know the difference between neutral and unproductive
These are not the same thing, and people conflate them.
Neutral time is supposed to be excluded from your score, not counted against you. If a manager is reading your number as though neutral time were a mark against you, that's a misreading of how the tool is designed to work, and it's fair to point that out.
It matters because a lot of ordinary work lands in neutral by default: general web browsing, research, internal tools nobody bothered to label. If that's being treated as time wasted, your real score is better than the one being quoted at you.
Work inside labelled-productive tools where you get the choice
When two tools do the same job, the one already labelled productive gives you a better record for identical work.
If drafting in a desktop document editor counts as productive but the same writing in a browser-based notepad lands in neutral, that's a free improvement for changing nothing but the app. Not everything gives you this choice, but where it does, it's the easiest points you'll find.
Keep sessions dense rather than long
Insightful reports work time next to productive hours, so the ratio between them matters as much as the raw total.
A long session full of idle gaps reads worse than a shorter, focused one. Where your deployment allows manual time entry for genuine offline work, using it beats leaving a session ticking through a two-hour meeting and racking up idle time that drags the ratio down.
Remember the app log is the fuller record
People manage their screenshots and forget the log underneath.
Screenshots are periodic snapshots. The application and website log is continuous. A site you had open for four minutes between two screenshots leaves no image but still shows up in the log with its duration attached. If you're thinking about what your manager can see, the log is usually the more complete story, not the screenshots.
The part no label can fix
Sorting out your labels fixes categorisation. Keeping sessions tight fixes the ratio. Neither touches the underlying problem that calls, reading and thinking generate almost no input, and Insightful reads no input as idle no matter how the apps are labelled.
An hour on a client call is an hour of idle time. An afternoon reading specs is an afternoon of nothing measurable. That's the gap activity software fills, keeping a session registering as active through work the agent can't see. Our Insightful guide covers the setup, and LazyWork has a free trial if you want to run it against your own configuration.
One caution: Insightful has behavioural flagging that watches for activity it considers anomalous, so aim for a normal-looking pattern rather than a maximum. A steady ordinary day beats a suspiciously perfect one.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good productivity score in Insightful?
There's no universal number, because it depends entirely on how your organisation labelled the apps you use. A role whose tools are mostly labelled productive scores high with little effort; a role whose tools sit in neutral scores low doing the same work. Ask what your team average is before deciding yours is poor.
Why is my Insightful productivity low when I worked all day?
Almost always one of two things: the apps central to your job aren't labelled productive, or a big share of your day went into calls, reading and meetings that generate no measurable input. The first is a quick admin fix, the second is inherent to how the tool measures.
Can I see my own Insightful data?
Insightful supports giving employees access to their own dashboard, and markets it as a transparency feature. If your organisation has it switched on you can see exactly what your manager sees. If not, asking for it is a reasonable request, since the vendor promotes it as a selling point.
Does keeping active raise my Insightful score?
Not by itself. Because the score runs on app labels rather than raw input, staying active prevents idle flags but doesn't move a percentage that depends on which apps your time was spent in. The two are separate problems.
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