Why is my productivity score lower than I expected?

Open your own score breakdown to see exactly why: it shows what Activity level, Focus and App quality each contributed that day, so you don't have to guess.

How to check for yourself

On What We See, open the panel headed "Why your score is what it is." Each of the three rows shows the points it added, the share it counted for, and a short plain-language reason next to it. The real answer for that specific day is there, not in a general explanation.

What this means for you

A handful of things are true for everyone, and they're worth ruling out before you go looking further:

• Meetings count as work. Time in a meeting is never treated as unproductive.
• Idle time, a stretch with no keyboard or mouse input at all, is not scored. It isn't in the total your Focus share is measured against, it isn't averaged into your Activity level, and whatever app was on screen while you were away isn't in your App quality mix. Taking a lunch break doesn't cost you points for having eaten, and a longer absence doesn't cost you more than a shorter one. That is how a day is scored today; the two sections below are the days it doesn't hold for, and both of those are days in the past.
• Activity level is measured over the time you were actually there, so a low reading on that row means the stretches you did work were quiet ones, not that you were away for a while. It's a separate row for a reason, check it before assuming it's the same thing as being away from your desk. On a day old enough for the second section below, it's one of the two rows that stops being measured that way.
• A brief pause is not idle. It stays inside your working time, counted as part of the stretch you worked through, rather than being deducted.
• An app nobody in your organisation has classified counts as neutral, never against you.
• If a signal wasn't captured that day (a capability your org has switched off, or something you haven't consented to), it's shown as "not counted," never as a zero.
• If there's nothing to explain yet, you'll see "No score to explain for this day yet" rather than a misleading blank score. An empty day isn't a bad day.

Two things to know about older days

Scores recorded before this rule changed were not rewritten. Leaving your away-from-keyboard time out of all three signals is how the score works now, and it hasn't always been: it used to be counted in every one of them. Scores that were already recorded were left exactly as they were rather than quietly rewritten, because rewriting your history to match a new rule is its own kind of dishonesty. So for a day from before the change, the breakdown you open today can add up to a great deal more than the number stored against that day, not a point or two. On an eight-hour day with four of those hours spent away from the keyboard, an app your organisation counts as unproductive left on screen, the difference runs to tens of points out of a hundred. How much the gap is worth on your day depends on what the time away looked like, and only one part of it is a promise: Focus can only move in your favour, because the same focused minutes are now measured against a smaller total. Activity level and App quality are the parts that depend on the away time itself: usually they move your way too, but if the app left on screen while you were away is one your organisation counts as productive, then that time was flattering those two rows under the old rule and no longer is. The breakdown is the arithmetic as the rule now stands; the stored number is what was recorded at the time. If the recorded number is the one being used to talk about your work, say so. That's what Dispute this score is for.

Very old days lose some of their detail. The breakdown is rebuilt from the minute-by-minute record of the day. Your organisation sets how long that raw record is kept, and once it has been deleted only the day's daily totals remain. Past that point the Focus row is still measured the same way, but Activity level and App quality can only be averaged over the whole tracked day rather than just the time you were present, so on a day that old, those two rows may read lower than they would have. The date this starts applying to depends on your organisation's data-retention setting.

If you've checked the breakdown and still think it doesn't reflect your day, use Dispute this score on your own page. That's what it's there for.

Related

• Productivity score (overview)
• Do meetings count as work?
• Why is an app marked unproductive?
• Raise a dispute about a score