You type differently in every app.

Why one typing speed never told the truth

A single WPM figure averages over things that have nothing to do with each other. In your editor you pause to think, rename a variable, hop with the arrow keys; in chat you fire off short bursts of plain prose; in the browser you fill a field and stop. Collapse all of that into one number and the difference between them — the part worth reading — disappears. Pulse keeps them apart, attributing each session to the app you were actually in, so the speed you read is the speed for that kind of work.

The split is usually wider than people expect. It's common to be 20 WPM faster in a messaging app than in a code editor — not because your hands changed but because the work did, and that gap is signal, not noise. Reading it next to your overall statistics tells you which number to trust for which question.

Two columns do most of the explaining. Usage share shows where your day actually goes — often a browser or terminal you'd never have guessed sat at the top — while time spent grounds the percentages in hours, so a flattering speed earned in five minutes doesn't outrank a slower one you live in. When a single app dominates, check the rest of your setup against it — how each keyboard performs, and which sources Pulse counts or excludes so pasted text and AI completions never inflate a score.