Working hours, not wall clock
An issue that sits from Friday afternoon to Monday morning has not been stuck for three days. Turn on your working week and the same interval reads honestly.
Calendar time, weekend included
Working time, Sun–Thu 9–18, holidays excluded
Sunday-to-Thursday weeks, your own public holidays, your timezone, and daylight saving handled properly.
The whole project in one table
One row per issue, one column per status, with cycle and lead time. Sort it, group it by assignee, export it to a spreadsheet.
| Key | Assignee | To Do | In Progress | In Review | Cycle |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CMS-7 | Dana | 4h | 1d 2h | 3h | 1d 5h |
| CMS-8 | Omri | 1d | 2d 4h | 6d 1h | 9d 5h |
| CMS-9 | Dana | 2h | 6h | ||
| median | 4h | 1d 2h | 4d 12h | 5d 5h |
A blank cell means the issue never entered that status, which is not the same as being quick about it.
What you get
- A badge on every card and issue showing the time in its current status, turning amber and then red as it ages.
- A breakdown per issue: every status it passed through, how long each visit took, and how many times it came back.
- A report across a whole project: one row per issue, one column per status, with cycle time, lead time, and the average, median and 85th percentile underneath. Sort it, group it by assignee, export it.
- Working hours, not wall clock. An issue left over a weekend reads as two hours of working time rather than sixty-five hours of calendar time. Sunday-to-Thursday weeks and your own holidays included.
Why not just use Jira?
Jira gets close in three places and stops short in all of them. "Days in column" shows dots on a card and cannot be made to show a number, and a project admin has to switch it on. The Control Chart draws cycle time as a chart, so you cannot read one issue off it or break it down by status. The Cumulative Flow Diagram counts issues per status over time rather than time per issue.
There is a whole category of paid Marketplace apps that fill this gap, which is the clearest evidence that the gap is real.
Why not one of those apps?
Marketplace apps are installed onto the Jira site, which means an administrator has to approve it, and they are licensed for every user on the site rather than for you. On a site with two hundred people that is a bill in the hundreds per month, for a report one person wanted.
TimeInColumn installs into your browser. No admin, no ticket, no meeting.
Your data does not go anywhere
The extension talks to exactly one server: your own Jira site, using the session you are already signed in with. There is no backend to send anything to.
No account. No analytics. No third-party code. Read the privacy policy, it is short and specific.
Installing
Add it from the Chrome Web Store, then open any Jira board. The badges appear by themselves; there is nothing to configure to get started.
Working hours and holidays are off by default and live in the extension's settings, so the numbers mean wall-clock time until you say otherwise.
Guides
Written because the answers were scattered across forum threads. They cover the free methods honestly, including the ones that replace this extension.
- Time in status without a marketplace app — six methods compared, and where each one stops.
- Jira "Days in column": what the dots mean and why they reset — the feature that gets closest, and its three limits.
- Cycle time vs lead time in Jira — where each boundary sits, and why the gap is the useful number.
- Finding the bottleneck in a Jira workflow — reading status durations without being fooled by an average.
What it costs
Nothing today. Everything described on this page is free and unlocked.
Paid features may arrive later, and if they do, anyone who installed before that keeps everything they have. That is not a slogan: the extension records your install date from its first version precisely so the promise can be kept.