Jira Time Tracking Best Practices for 2025

[#1]

Struggling to estimate and log time accurately in Jira? You're not alone. Many teams face similar challenges — especially in fast-paced Agile environments. By following Jira time tracking best practices, you can take control of your team’s productivity, make smarter estimations, and get more value out of your time tracking tools. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to optimize your time tracking process using Jira and extend its capabilities with powerful add-ons like Worklogs and Time Assistant.

Why estimating work time is crucial

Accurate time estimation is a cornerstone of successful project management. It helps teams plan effectively, allocate resources wisely, and deliver on time. However, it is quite easy to make a mistake in creating clear timelines and managing yours and your team’s workload. Teams often fall into two traps: being overly optimistic and failing to anticipate delays, or being too cautious and allocating more time than necessary. 

Inaccurate time estimation can disrupt your schedule, reduce efficiency, and impact the overall quality of work. Especially in client-facing projects, missing deadlines can be perceived as failure - even if the end product meets quality expectations. Only when you understand how long tasks truly take, you’re better equipped to set realistic goals, manage expectations, and keep your team motivated. Clear time estimation enables better workload distribution and ultimately drives business success.

The role of time tracking in IT Project Management

Time tracking is a critical component of Agile Software Development and IT project management. It informs Product Owners and Team Leads about actual effort versus estimated effort, helping improve Sprint Planning, resource allocation, and budget tracking.

When used effectively, time tracking helps:

• Estimate project costs more accurately (both time and materials)
• Set realistic deadlines
• Keep the team focused and avoid scope creep
• Maintain transparency across the development process
• Identify bottlenecks or unexpected delays early on

Modern tools have made this process easier. Time tracking can now be automated and customized, allowing you to track effort through various metrics such as time, story points, or work item count - all tailored to your team’s preferences.

To follow Jira time tracking best practices, it’s important to choose tools and methods that reduce manual effort while giving you full visibility into your team’s workload.

Is Jira the right tool for time tracking?

Jira offers built-in time tracking functionality that allows users to log the time they spend on tasks. It’s enabled by default and can be customized through project permissions. However, Jira’s native capabilities are limited when it comes to reporting and overview:

• You can't easily see how much time was logged by individual users across work items.
• There's no centralized page to manage or analyze worklogs collectively.
• Reporting features are basic and often insufficient for managerial insights.

For managers looking to gain comprehensive insights into team productivity or generate advanced reports, these constraints may hinder efficiency. That’s why many teams turn to Atlassian Marketplace apps to expand Jira’s capabilities.

One such tool is Worklogs – Time Tracking and Time Reports by SolDevelo, which supports Jira time tracking best practices by offering greater visibility and deeper insights.

Jira time tracking best practices for 2025

To truly master Jira time tracking best practices in 2025, it’s not enough to simply log hours. You need a system that supports accurate estimation, consistent tracking, and meaningful analysis. It’s about combining the right mindset with the right tools to build workflows that are both efficient and transparent. In this section, we’ll explore how to turn routine time logging into a powerful advantage - with the help of apps designed to boost Jira’s native capabilities.

Estimating made easier with Worklogs

Worklogs – Time Tracking and Time Reports simplifies time tracking and reporting for Jira users. This app makes it easy to analyze how much time your team spends on tasks and projects over days, weeks, months, or even years.

Key benefits include:

• Clear breakdowns of logged hours
• Grouping by projects, users, or date ranges
• Filtering by estimation, Sprint, work item type, priority, and more
• Exporting data to Excel for custom reporting

Following Jira time tracking best practices means having access to the right insights at the right time. Worklogs bring a much-needed layer of transparency and analysis to time tracking in Jira. It helps teams identify areas where time is being spent efficiently - or wasted - making it easier to improve estimates and optimize workflow.

View all logged time with Worklogs

Let’s start with important information: Worklogs can be accessed through both a menu item or inserted into your dashboard as a gadget. Easily customizable and configurable, the app meets users’ different needs, especially while working on multiple projects!

How to get down to it? Firstly, after you install the app to your dashboard, you’ll see the table displaying on the main page. The table contains a summary of the logged time of you and other members of your team in the set period of time. 

On the main screen, by default, you will see the time logged by all the members of all the projects in which you participate. You can: 

• View time logged across all projects or specific ones
• Categorize and group the data by time estimation, Sprint, priority, status,  work item type, component, and many others
• Filter logs by project, user, group, or custom Jira filters
• Export worklogs to .xlsx format

When using the appropriate filters, you can easily get the complete record of the chosen teammates’ worklogs. What’s especially satisfying is that all the filters adjust to the period of time that you pick. You can limit your time frames to just one day, search for hours logged from the start of a project, or simply look at any other scope that works best for you. The choice is yours!

Apart from the option to filter data by the combination of date range, projects, users, or groups, you can simply use Jira filters. The latter can be personalized and adapted according to your individual needs. Jira filters help you to craft your own overview of work items that you want to track along with the time spent on them. 

Important note: you can combine the filters together and display the worklogs for the given time period and for the chosen users - or just for yourself!

You can also preview the work items behind logged hours by simply clicking on the numbers - a handy shortcut that helps you dive deeper into time use.

Whether you're managing multiple projects or just want a better handle on team productivity, Worklogs offers a flexible, user-friendly experience that aligns perfectly with Jira time tracking best practices.

Time Assistant – Your daily time logging companion

While Worklogs excels in tracking and analyzing time data, Time Assistant - Time Tracking and Workload Dashboard by SolDevelo complements it by solving one of the biggest time tracking challenges: logging time regularly.

Time Assistant helps users:

• Remember what they worked on by reviewing their Jira activity
• Log time automatically without guesswork or backtracking
• Build a consistent time logging habit
• Reduce time tracking friction across the team

The solution at hand

Keeping detailed time logs is a simple habit with a powerful impact. It helps you improve estimates, allocate resources better, and boost team accountability. With Worklogs, you get a complete view of your team’s efforts and performance. And when you pair it with Time Assistant, time tracking becomes easier than ever before.

In 2025, precise time tracking isn’t just a best practice - it’s essential for staying competitive. If you're serious about improving productivity, managing workloads, and enhancing transparency in Jira, booking a demo with us is a smart choice to start with. Let Jira time tracking best practices guide your journey toward better planning, execution, and results.