Understanding time in status (how long issues spend in each workflow status) is essential for any team — Agile or not.
However, if you’ve tried tracking this in Jira, you’ve likely run into a problem. Native options feel limited. They are also hard to customize. As a result, they rarely provide the visibility teams actually need.
In this article, you’ll discover a simple way to track total and average time in status. You’ll also learn how to use the Time In Status gadget offered by Great Gadgets app for Jira and Confluence.
Why Jira’s Native Time In Status Tracking Falls Short
Jira offers a few built-in tools. Still, they’re limited in accuracy and flexibility.
• Average Time in Status gadget – Shows average time spent per status, but lacks custom grouping, detailed aggregation, and advanced charts.
• Days in Column on Jira boards – Displays dots on issue cards that represent days spent in a column. Even so, this feature has drawbacks. It requires admin access to enable, it only shows days, not hours and you can’t exclude weekends.
Because there’s no unified, accurate view, teams might struggle to identify slow parts of the workflow, compare performance across teams or projects, or measure performance accurately. As a result, dashboards often fail to reflect real efficiency.
That’s where the Time In Status gadget from Great Gadgets comes in.
A Better Way: The Time In Status Gadget Offered by Great Gadgets
The Time In Status gadget provides a clear and flexible view of how work moves through your workflow. You can add it directly to your Jira dashboards. From there, you can monitor time in real time.
Because we know every team operates differently, we build each gadget to be highly configurable. Every team works differently, so customization matters.
The Time In Status gadget provides capabilities far beyond what Jira offers out of the box:
- Tracks time in workflow statuses, status categories, or board columns
- Measures total time or average time in hours, days, or minutes
- Includes subtasks in calculations for true accuracy
- Allows selecting specific statuses or status categories to include or exclude
- Can group results by assignee, project, priority, or other custom fields
- Displays results in charts of various types: pie charts, bar charts, column or stacked column charts.
- Can display a detailed report with time for individual issues
👉 Watch the video tutorial below to learn how to set up and customize the gadget:
Why It Matters
Time in status is more than just a metric. It drives continuous improvement.
With clear visibility into your workflow, teams and managers can:
- See delays early and take action before deadlines slip.
- Understand what parts of the workflow need optimization.
- Understand team performance: see who is overloaded, where work stalls, and how flow can be improved.
The Time In Status gadget adapts to any workflow and is just as useful for software teams as for marketing, HR, operations, ITSM or any kind – agile or not.
👉 If you’d like to test it out, Great Gadgets is free for 30 days on the Atlassian Marketplace.
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