Your team is overloaded. The roadmap didn't shrink. Hiring in the Netherlands is slow, expensive, and often frustrating. A programme lead wants developers next month. Finance wants lower run costs. Security wants tighter control. Then someone says, “We should outsource this,” and someone else replies, “No, we should offshore it.”

That argument usually starts in the wrong place.

For a CIO, outsourcing vs offshoring isn't a location debate first. It's an operating model decision. You are deciding who runs the work, who owns the process, who carries delivery risk, and how much control you want when things go wrong.

Hi there,

We've just released WhatPulse v6.2! The headline additions are word counting, an end-user pause toggle for transparent data collection, and proxy configuration built right into the login wizard, a frequent request from teams behind corporate networks. Beyond that, there's a range of UI improvements and bug fixes.

Details below:

Word counting: a new output metric for your dashboards​

WhatPulse now tracks how many words each person types, without ever storing the text itself. Word counts are inferred locally from keystroke patterns: word boundaries are detected from key events (spaces, punctuation, enter, etc.), corrections like backspace and delete are accounted for, and IME input methods are supported. Only the numeric counts ever leave the machine.

For organizations, this adds a new dimension of activity data alongside keystrokes, clicks, application time, and bandwidth. Word counts roll up per user and per application, so you can see typing-heavy work across teams and roles without compromising privacy — the content is never captured, only the count.

Word counting is on by default and respects your existing keyboard and per-application tracking settings, so it honors whatever boundaries you've already configured for your organization.

The word count metric is available in the desktop app, but also flows into your WhatPulse Professional dashboards. It's in your dashboards, data views, reports, and exports alongside the other metrics, so you can analyze it in combination with keystrokes, application time, and more. For teams looking to understand typing-heavy work or simply add another dimension to their activity insights, word counting is a powerful new tool.

A pause toggle for transparent data collection​

Transparency and trust are central to deploying activity tracking across a team. The new pause toggle in the tray popup lets a user stop collection on their own machine at any time — for a benchmark, a stress test, a colleague borrowing the keyboard, or simply a personal moment.

While paused, it's unmistakable: the status bar pill turns orange with an explanatory tooltip, the overview tab shows an amber banner with a one-click "Resume collecting" button, and the stats grid grays out behind an overlay. Activity during a pause is dropped rather than buffered, so resuming never retroactively logs the paused period. The pause is intentionally runtime-only and resets when the client restarts — a clear, honest control that helps your team feel comfortable with always-on insights.

Configure a proxy from the login wizard​

This one is for the IT departments. Computers behind a corporate proxy can now be configured before they ever authenticate. A new "Configure proxy..." button on the login and activation pages opens a dedicated proxy dialog, so first-time activation no longer requires reaching the Settings tab (which only becomes available after login).

For organizations rolling out the client at scale across managed networks, this removes a common snag in the deployment and activation flow.

This doesn't apply to environments where the proxy was centrally managed by the settings overrides.

Redesigned input history page​

The input history page in the client has been rebuilt with a cleaner look and better usability for end users reviewing their own activity:

• Grouped bar chart with interactive legend: Click series in the legend to show/hide them. Hidden series free up bar width for the remaining ones, and legend preferences are remembered across sessions.
• Flexible time periods: The fixed period dropdowns are replaced with the same time period selector used on the uptime page — today through all-time, plus custom date ranges.
• Group by hour, day, week, month or year: A new group-by control zooms in or out on typing and clicking trends, with a sensible default chosen automatically for the selected period.

Smaller UI improvements​

• Status bar actions: Reset and Export buttons have moved from individual tab pages into the shared status bar at the bottom. They update based on the active page, freeing up vertical space and making the reset button less likely to be clicked by accident.
• New animated toggle: A polished animated pill toggle replaces the previous mix of buttons and dropdowns for switching between chart and data views, for a more consistent look across the app.

Fixed​

• Fixed proxy settings not persisting between sessions; changes made in Settings > Proxy now save correctly and apply immediately without a restart.
• Windows: Fixed a high CPU usage issue that could occur on startup when running as administrator.
• Windows: Fixed mouse heatmap clustering on displays with DPI scaling, where clicks in the right and bottom portions of the screen were dropped or misattributed to the wrong monitor.
• Windows: Improved detection of application version information, especially for games and smaller tools that don't include full version metadata.
• Fixed the application sync window sorting by "last used" — it was sorting alphabetically on the text (e.g. "22 hours" before "3 days") instead of by actual date.
• Fixed being able to open the FAQ window by clicking on empty space in the row instead of the actual text.

How to update​

Clients can upgrade via the "Check for Updates" option inside the app (if updates are enabled), or by deploying the latest build from the Downloads page through your usual management tooling. Once updated, the new data flows straight into your WhatPulse Professional dashboards.

Thanks for being part of the WhatPulse Professional community — plenty more on the way.

— Martijn & the WhatPulse team

You probably know the scene. The project is late, the team has clearly been working hard, and the budget review turns into a guessing exercise. People remember being busy. Nobody can say, with much confidence, where the week went.

That's usually where project time tracking gets dragged back into the conversation. Half the room thinks “timesheets”. The other half thinks “surveillance”. Both reactions are understandable, and both miss the useful middle ground.

Good project time tracking isn't about squeezing people for more output or forcing everyone into a Friday afternoon admin ritual. It's about getting a believable picture of effort, flow, and workload so delivery decisions stop relying on memory. In IT and operations teams, that matters more than most leaders admit. Hybrid work, fragmented tool stacks, support interruptions, project work mixed with BAU, and a mix of full-time and part-time contracts can make “everyone looks busy” almost meaningless as a planning signal.

The tools have changed too. Manual entry still has a place for billing and approvals, but it's a poor primary source for understanding how work happens. Privacy-first automated capture, especially application usage and activity-based signals that avoid content capture, gives teams a better option. You get enough fidelity to spot bottlenecks and estimate properly, without turning people's screens into evidence lockers.

Budgets get squeezed in a familiar way. Revenue is under pressure, headcount is hard to change, and every team is asked to “find savings” without breaking service, delivery, or morale. That usually leads to a bad cycle: pause spending, delay renewals, cut a few obvious items, then watch costs drift back within a quarter or two.

Real operational cost savings don't come from a one-off clean-up. They come from building a way to spot waste, prove what changed, and keep the gain after the project team has moved on. In practice, that means treating costs as a live system. People, software, cloud resources, manual work, duplicated tools, and slow handoffs all interact.

What often gets missed is decay. You cancel a tool, then three months later a similar one appears on a different card. You automate a workflow, but staff keep the old workaround. You migrate a workload, but don't retire the old environment. Savings vanish because nobody is watching usage and run-rate after the change.

You can feel the tension before the pilot even starts.

An IT lead wants better visibility into software usage across a hybrid team. Finance wants to know which licences are sitting idle. Engineering managers want a cleaner picture of focus time, meeting load, and tool switching. HR and legal hear the word “monitoring” and immediately think screenshots, keystroke logging, and employee complaints.

That tension is reasonable. Most organisations do need better work-pattern data. They also need to avoid turning endpoint analytics into a trust problem.

The useful way to think about productivity monitoring tools is this: you're not trying to watch people. You're trying to answer operational questions that are hard to answer by instinct alone. Which applications are heavily used? Which ones are barely touched? Where do teams lose focus? Which processes create constant context switching? Which devices or departments need support, not pressure?

The mistake is treating every monitoring tool as if it does the same thing. Some products are built like surveillance software. Others are built like telemetry systems for work patterns. That difference decides whether a rollout helps the business or backfires with employees.

A good starting point is to frame the project around transparency and work-pattern insight, not control. This practical note on optimising work patterns with data transparency gets at the core issue well. Teams usually accept measurement more readily when they can see what's being collected, why it's being collected, and what won't be collected.