🕒 How to Track Time to First Action, Active Work Time, and Total Completion Time in Jira

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If you’re using Jira to manage requests, tasks, or bug reports — especially in a business or support context — you’ve likely asked yourself these questions:

• How long does it take for someone to pick up a new ticket after it’s submitted?
  
• How much time is actually spent working on the issue, excluding delays?
  
• What’s the total time from ticket creation to resolution? 
  

                       

Let’s add a real-life flavor to this.

One Salesforce admin/dev team managing tickets in a company-managed business project came to us with these exact same questions. They were trying to build reports showing:

🟢 Time from ticket submission to the first status change (like from “To Do” → “In Progress”)
🔵 Time actively spent working on the ticket
🔴 Total time from submission to resolution

And guess what? They didn’t want to mess with scripting, build complex automation, or tweak Jira workflows just to get these metrics.

Time Metrics Tracker | Time Between Statuses helped them visualize and measure all of that — no coding, no headaches. Just plug in and go.

And if you’re here, you’re probably looking for the same thing:
How can I report on Jira ticket durations easily, without scripting or complex automation? 

Let’s break this down. 👇

🔍 Key Time Metrics Explained

Let’s start with some helpful definitions — understanding these can help structure your Jira reporting more clearly:

Metric	Definition
Ticket Pickup Time (or Time to First Response)	Time from when the issue is created to when someone starts working on it.
Work Time (or Active Time)	Time the ticket spends in statuses where work is actively being done.
Resolution Time (or Cycle Time)	Total time from ticket creation to completion.

These are key Jira performance metrics that can help you evaluate team responsiveness, throughput, and identify bottlenecks.

🧩 Key Jira Time Metrics You Need to Know

Let’s first deeper define metrics you’re likely trying to capture. These terms are commonly used in Agile and ITSM workflows:

1. Time to First Action (a.k.a. First Response Time or Pickup Time)

This is the time between when a ticket is created and when it is first acted on — usually marked by a status change like “To Do” ➝ “In Progress”.

📌 Why it matters: It shows how responsive your team is to new work.

Use Case: Measure Time to First Action (Pickup Time)

🔍 Goal:

Find out how long tickets sit untouched before someone starts work.

🛠 How to do it:

• Select “From” status = To Do
  
  
• Select “To” status = In Progress (or whatever status indicates work has begun)

The app calculates the time between these two transitions across all issues, and provides an average pickup time with filters by assignee, label, sprint, and more.

2. Active Work Time (a.k.a. Time in Progress)

This is the total time a ticket spends in working statuses — such as “In Progress,” “Under Development,” or “Code Review” — where actual effort is happening.

📌 Why it matters: It separates true work time from waiting or blocked time.

Use Case: Measure Active Work Time

🔍 Goal:

Calculate the total time spent actively working on a ticket.

🛠 How to do it:

• Include working statuses: In Progress, Code Review, etc.
  
  
• Exclude waiting or paused statuses: Waiting for Customer, Blocked, Pending Approval

This gives you the actual effort time, not inflated by delays outside your team’s control.

3. Resolution Time (a.k.a. Total Time to Completion or Cycle Time)

This is the end-to-end time from when the issue is created until it is resolved or closed — such as from “To Do” ➝ “Done”.

📌 Why it matters: It reflects how efficiently your team completes work.

Use Case: Measure Total Resolution Time

🔍 Goal:

Track the full lifecycle of a ticket, from creation to closure.

🛠 How to do it:

• Choose the full status path: To Do ➝ Done, including intermediate statuses.

You’ll get insights into how long each ticket takes to resolve, and can compare resolution time across teams, priorities, issue types, or time periods.

⚠️ Why Jira’s Native Reports Often Fall Short

While Jira does include some reporting tools like Control Charts and Created vs Resolved Reports, they often:

• Don’t allow you to choose custom status pairs
  
  
• Can’t exclude specific statuses like “Waiting for Customer”
  
  
• Require manual setup (e.g., automation rules + custom fields) for time tracking
  
  
• Don’t give visual dashboards or export options for detailed analysis
  
  

This makes it hard to answer questions like “How long did this ticket wait before someone started working on it?” or “What was the true time spent on active work?”

🧩 The Limitations of Jira’s Built-in Reports

Jira does offer some native reports, but they don’t provide granular control over what you’re measuring. For example:

• Control Chart shows Cycle Time, but you can’t specify custom status pairs like “To Do” ➝ “In Progress.”
• Created vs Resolved Report gives you a high-level look at throughput, but not what happens between.
• Automation + custom fields can help, but setting that up is time-consuming and doesn’t work retroactively.

That’s where a specialized reporting add-on becomes a time-saver.

📊 Agile Gadget Dashboards, Scatter Plots & Histograms

Beyond numeric reports, Time Metrics Tracker offers visual insights:

• Agile Dashboards with gadget support
  
  
• Scatter Plot Charts to analyze trends over time (e.g., cycle time across weeks)
  
  
• Histograms to spot bottlenecks or outliers
  
  
• Pie Charts (via export) for category comparison
  
  
• Average Time Reports to get team-wide insights at a glance

All of these can be filtered by project, label, sprint, version, or custom JQL queries.

🔁 No Retroactive Data Loss

One of the most powerful features: Time Metrics Tracker pulls historical issue data, meaning you can generate time-based reports even for tickets created before you installed the app.

🚀 Final Thoughts

If you’re running a Salesforce admin/dev team inside Jira — or any team managing operational tickets — and you need to report on:

• When tickets are picked up
• How long they're actively worked on
• Total time to resolution

…then Time Metrics Tracker is a smart, no-fuss solution to help you visualize and optimize that workflow.

You can find it here:
👉 Time Metrics Tracker | Time Between Statuses on Atlassian Marketplace

Let me know if you want help configuring your first report — happy to share use-case templates!