Admin Onboarding - Item Workspace - Right Bar: Time Spent

Item Workspace Tour: Right Bar Features - Time Spent

DevStride uses the concept of "time spent" primarily for the purpose of creating ongoing predictability.

It is not intended to be a payroll or billing time-tracking system. However, you can choose to derive time spent information from DevStride in service of those needs. For more information on time spent for payroll or billing tracking, please reach out to your DevStride implementation team.

We will be focusing here on using DevStride's time spent capabilities as they relate to project performance and predictability.

Time spent in DevStride represents the sum of time spent on an individual task. This can be rolled up to modules, etc.

The goal of identifying time spent on a task or a group of tasks is not micromanagement. The main purpose of tracking time spent is to help size the work appropriately in future estimations. This increases overall predictability.

To that end, DevStride ties your time spent information (1) on each item to your estimate, and indicates whether the time was over or under the original guess (2).

In DevStride, time is tracked at the lowest item type level in your hierarchy (for example, tasks). DevStride aggregates the time spent entries for the lowest level items and displays the total at their parent level. The parent time tracked fields are not editable as they reflect the total of the child-items time.

At the parent level, DevStride indicates any actual time overage (1) compared to the estimate (2) as a percentage.

In the case of time spent overage, warning icons display on the item and throughout the system on workstreams, boards, and gantt charts. These icons link to an interactive completion stats pop-up (3).

Note: While you can assign an owner at a parent-level item, only the time for the individual child tasks they are assigned to follow the parent-level owner. The assignee here is primarily used for understanding accountability for the parent level, as is often done with organizations using RACI (responsibility) charts. If the owner of the parent has any work to do themselves on a parent item, that work should be tracked as child tasks.

In this example below, this parent item is assigned to someone responsible for the overall work. The owners of the tasks of the child items are listed below (2). The time for the child items belongs to assignees of those items.

Recording Time on an Item

The Time Spent field in the item's right bar shows the total time recorded against that item. Where you can enter time depends on where the item sits in your hierarchy:

• On a leaf item (a lowest-level item, such as a task), the Time Spent field is editable, and you can log time directly against it.
• On a parent item, the field is read-only and shows Calculated from child items.
• On an item that tracks time on its subtasks, the field is read-only and shows Calculated from subtasks.

This reinforces the principle described above: time is captured at the lowest level of your hierarchy and rolls up to parents automatically. When there is no time recorded yet, the field shows No time tracked.

Open the time-tracking view

For any item where you can record time, you have two ways to get to its time entries:

• Open the item drawer's Time Tracking tab.
• Click the Time Spent field (or the Time Spent cell in the Items Table) to open the Time Entries modal.

Both routes show the same information: a Total Time Spent: summary at the top, a New Entry button, and a table of individual entries. The table has columns for Time, Description, Start, End, Contributor, and Actions. Click a row, or use the edit and delete icons in the Actions column, to edit or remove an entry.

Every column except Actions — Time, Description, Start, End, and Contributor — is sortable by clicking its header. Long descriptions truncate with an ellipsis and show their full text on hover.

Add or edit a time entry

Click New Entry to open the entry form (titled Track Time), or open an existing entry to edit it (titled Edit Tracked Time). The form has these fields:

• Time Spent (HH:MM) — required. The duration you worked. See Entering durations below for the two ways you can type this.
• Date Ended — the date the work finished. Leave it on Any Date if you do not need a specific date. DevStride computes the entry's start date by subtracting the duration from the end date, so the start and end dates cannot be the same. The date picker places no restriction on future dates, so you can date an entry in the future — useful for logging planned work.
• Contributor — who the time belongs to. See Logging time for a teammate below.
• Description — an optional note about the work (placeholder Work Description).

Click Save to add a new entry or Update to apply your edits. Cancel discards the form.

Entering durations

The Time Spent (HH:MM) field accepts two input styles, and your choice is remembered for you between sessions:

• Natural (the default) — type the duration flexibly. You can enter 1h 30m, 90 minutes, or 2:45. A bare number is treated as hours, so 1.5 becomes 1 hour 30 minutes. The field shows the hint e.g. 1h 30m.
• Ledger — fast numeric entry where digits fill in from the right. Typing 130 fills to 01:30. Minutes are capped at 59.

Use whichever style fits how you think about time; both produce the same HH:MM result.

Logging time for a teammate

The Contributor field controls who a time entry belongs to. It defaults to you, but you can pick any other member of your organization instead — that records the time on their behalf. You can also choose No User if the time should not be attributed to a specific person.

There is no separate "log on behalf" mode: choosing a different Contributor in the standard entry form is all it takes.

Time and Subtasks

DevStride can track estimates and time on sub-tasks as well.

How to do it:

On the subtasks tab (1), use the configure icon (2) to enable the time estimation and/or tracking (3).

Subtasks' time and estimation updates (4) for this item will now roll up to the item totals(5).

What this gives you

Tracking time for subtasks is useful when the individual steps are substantial enough to want to track time on them. An example might be that a user story item might take several steps to complete. Tracking those subtasks and the time each take helps for both estimating the task and tracking its overall time.

Reviewing Time Across Users

To see recorded time across people and items, use the User Time Tracking report in Analytics. A Group By selector lets you organize the entries in one of three ways:

• Date (the default) — one section per date.
• Item — one section per item, with matching subtasks nested underneath.
• None — a flat list of items.

Subtask time is always shown separately, in its own Subtasks sections with their own subtotals, because it comes from a distinct data source. Your Group By choice is remembered between sessions.

Tracking Overdue Dates

If you use a custom field of type Date or DateTime, an organization admin can turn on a Track overdue toggle for that field in Settings > Data Model > Custom Fields (it appears below the field's Description, and only for Date/DateTime fields). This toggle is off by default.

When it is on, a past-due date value shows in red with an (Overdue) label in the Items Table. Overdue styling only applies to top-level work items that are not yet completed; it does not apply to subtasks or workstreams. This is useful for surfacing missed dates without affecting purely informational date fields.

Now, continue to tour the features on the right bar of the item workspace:

Team through Status

Point Estimates

Time Estimates

Best Practices for Time Estimates

Priority

Start Dates and Due Dates

Progress Tracking

Custom Fields

For spreadsheet-style weekly time entry in the Weekly Logs plugin (under Plugins in the app menu), see Weekly Logs.