What it is
Days in column is a board setting that adds small grey dots to the bottom of each card. One dot is one day the issue has spent in the column it is currently in.
It is genuinely useful. It costs nothing, it needs no app, and it makes the one stuck card in a column visible without anyone running a report. If it does what you need, use it.
How to turn it on
Open the board, go into board settings, and enable Days in column. Where exactly it lives depends on the project type — under card layout in a company-managed board, under the board's features in a team-managed one — and Atlassian moves it around between versions.
The part that does not move: you need project admin permission on that board. If the setting is not there, it is almost always because you do not have it, not because your project lacks the feature. On a business project it may be missing entirely.
The three things people run into
1. Dots, not numbers
Four dots you can read. Eleven dots you count twice and get wrong. There is no setting that turns the dots into a numeral, and "show the duration in days instead of dots" is one of the most-repeated requests about the feature.
2. It resets when an issue comes back
This is the one that actually misleads. Days in column measures the current visit, not the total.
What the dots show after it bounced back from review yesterday
What In Progress has actually cost across three attempts
A ticket that was picked up, sent to review, rejected, picked up again, sent back again, and is now in progress for the third time is the single most expensive kind of ticket on your board — and it is the one Days in column makes look freshest. The number resets every time the problem repeats.
3. Calendar days, weekends included
An issue moved on Friday afternoon shows two dots on Monday morning, having been untouched and untouchable the whole time. Nothing about the work took two days. On a Sunday-to-Thursday week the mismatch is worse, because the dots assume a week you do not work.
The workarounds people suggest
The usual advice is to abandon the built-in feature and rebuild it with an automation rule that writes elapsed time into a custom field. That does produce a real number, and it can be made to survive a round trip.
Its cost is stated less often: an automation rule only fires on transitions that happen after you build it. Every issue already on your board — including the nine-day one above — reports nothing until it moves again. The full comparison of the free methods covers this and the four others.
What we do instead
TimeInColumn reads the same history Jira has always kept and puts a readable number on the card:
A number rather than dots, ambering and then reddening at thresholds you set.
Against the three problems above:
- Numbers. Days if you prefer days, hours and minutes if the work is faster than that.
- Round trips are kept. The card badge still shows the current visit, because that is what you want while scanning a board — but opening the issue shows every status with the total across all visits and how many times the issue came back. The nine days do not disappear.
- Working hours are optional. Turn them on and the weekend stops counting, on whichever days your team actually works, with your own holidays.
- No admin. It is a browser extension, so it installs for you and changes nothing on the Jira site.