Plan your worklogs in Jira with Timetracker’s new feature
Effortless time tracking arrived to Jira with the Timeline feature of Timetracker
Say goodbye to Daily Work, and say hello to the brand new Timeline view!
The Daily Work view gave a home for creating and managing work logs for seven years. Thousands of customers created hundreds of thousands of entries over the years — and provided an extensive amount of feedback for us. One of the most interesting takeaways was that a huge amount of users (members of our own team included) use time tracking in a way where they don’t know which Issue they’ll log their work to in advance, so they have to keep a separate record somewhere until they can create their worklogs retroactively at the end of the day or week.
During the seven years, a lot of things changed in the Atlassian Ecosystem and in the broader time tracking SaaS field as well. Timetracker’s Daily Work view originated in the Server platform, and the layout didn’t change much even when we created the Cloud version of it, so an upgrade on the UI was due. We also see popular tools like Toggl and Clockify give users the option to log their worklogs without linking them to a specific project or issue. By bringing the ease of use features of other Saas tools into Jira time tracking, we are hoping to bring more users to the Atlassian Ecosystem as well.
Based on these insights, we completely revised this view to provide you with a comfortable and effective place to create and overview your work. The Timeline view allows you to create worklogs with the experience of writing personal notes in a plain text editor. Let’s show you how in detail below.
Log your work now, add details later
The Timeline not only provides a more elegant and easy-to-use interface, but it also gives you a completely new and unique time tracking option in Jira.
With the Timeline you can now create partially finished worklogs, leaving the description, start time, duration, or even the Issue to specify for later. It provides a convenient way to record your work during your day as quickly as if you were taking notes in a notebook. It lets you clarify it later or link it to an Issue. Having this, you can also plan your future working times and tasks, which then you can easily convert to real worklogs by assigning an Issue to them later.
Planned worklogs won’t be present in Jira. They’ll be converted automatically to a Jira worklog when you specify all necessary attributes for them: start time, duration (or end time), and a selected Issue. A description will be also required if your Timetracker is configured with mandatory worklog descriptions. The planned worklogs (which aren’t synced to Jira) will be marked with an icon on the left of the rows.
Creating worklogs without linking them to issues allows you to plan your work by creating placeholder entries that can be updated later with a few clicks.
Logging your work is easier than ever
We tried to make logging work more natural with the new view, similarly to making personal notes on a plain text document. You can create worklogs one after another on the keyboard without using your mouse. In addition to seamless item creation, bulk edit features are also available for moving the worklogs around in time or between Issues.
Would you like to add more context? Go ahead! Multi-line descriptions are now supported when creating a new entry.
To make it more natural all time formats work properly when logging work, and if you enable this option, it will even auto-fill the Start and End fields in some cases. If you create a new worklog, it’s Start date will be end End date of the previous worklog on the same day (if there are any), and the default for a End dates will be the actual time.
And for example with durations, you can use “90”, “90min”, “1:30”, or with Start/End dates, you can use “900” “0900” “09:00” and so on, with a variety of different combinations.
And speaking of durations – if want to use timetracker for only logging durations for your work, now you can. You can hide the Start and End dates and even the daily tracker to make the overview simpler. Please note, that for administrative reasons Timetracker will just add Start-End dates based on the default dates for these timelogs.
Manage your worklogs easily
Editing existing worklogs is easier than ever. On each worklog row, just click in the field you wish to edit and type away! Your changes will be saved immediately!
You can also move a specific worklog to a different day by selecting the target day using the date picker on the worklog row. You can perform additional actions on each worklog like duplicating, splitting or deleting it.
You want to modify more than one worklogs together? You can now do this with our new bulk edit option. Just select the worklogs and modify them with one screen.
Better overview of your weekdays
The Timeline view provides an overview of your current day and you can check the past days too, similar to how you can use the Calendar for a quick understanding of your days. You can scroll down for viewing more weekdays. On the daily timescale, the lines will show what you worked on, based on the color codes of your Issue settings, so spotting longer than usual tasks or holes in a workday becomes super easy. In the upper right corner, you can also see weekly and monthly progress bars, with hover fields containing summaries of logged time.
For all the features and options, check our user guide about the new Timeline here.
What’s next?
The feature of planning ahead with Issue-less worklogs currently works only in the Timeline view. In the near future, we are planning to implement this to the Calendar view as well. We also have other planned features, but let them remain in a shroud of mystery at the moment. We will reveal them when the time is right.
We are also still looking to hear from you and your insights. Get in touch through our Service Desk, let us know about your needs, and don’t stop feeding our backlog with insights and requests.
Stay tuned and keep logging your work. 🦾
