Time in status for field, or "field modification date"

[Oshyan]

ClickUp just debut a cool and useful feature called “Time in status”, which shows you how long a Task has had a particular status. A great way with no hacking around to see what tasks might be overlooked and need attention. If Fields in Fibery have a modification date (in the data, not exposed yet), then that could potentially be used for the same thing and perhaps more (i.e. useful not just for Status field). It’s not a must-have, but certainly a nicety. See ClickUp version below.

[B_Sp]

Funny I too have been wishing I could see that here in Fibery! You and I were chatting about tasks getting “stale” and I was just thinking about this in my work in Fibery today:

@Oshyan

@B_Sp

And just to follow on this point, I do not want to hide “not done” items that are stale. Those are in fact very important to see in the board so we can catch stuff that is “getting stale” and should be attended to.

Yes, very important here as well! I hate to admit it, but some tasks do just sit there for ages (sometimes by design, other times… )

This is a great way to get more insight into that. This ties into a big hope of mine that when Automations come around, you’ll be able to affect Date fields by moving status, and thus get even more insight into execution and how long you are in a particular status.

This is something that I saw amazingly well implemented in TargetProcess (sadly you can’t get a free account any more to see some of this stuff). I think if I remember correctly it worked like this:

• you set a ‘planned start date’ and ‘planned due date’ - what you might regularly do as a “date range” in something like ClickUp
• when you moved the status to a defined “in progress” state - and TP had a great multi-faceted Workflow that I hope gets to Fibery one day too, @mdubakov really tempted me about that here (have you seen @Oshyan?):

@mdubakov

@B_Sp Yeah, when we will create proper Kanban App in Fibery this should be done. In general Kanban MVP will require the following things:

1. Cycle/Lead Time calculation
2. Reports (CFD, CT distribution, CT change over time)
3. Groups of States on a board
4. WIP limits

• then, a “date started” field was filled in automatically. So now you can see how long it took for you actually start when when you thought you’d start.
• when you move to a “completed” status, another date field called “actual completion date” fills in.

So then you can do cool stuff like:

• compare planned to actual start date
• compare planned to actual completion date
• look at planned start date and actual completion date to see how well you did on execution in the larger picture: when you actually got to something you planned, and when you finished it, vs. when you thought you’d start & finish.

So this is the type of stuff I am really dreaming of in Fibery since it was so well done in TargetProcess. And “time an entity sits in a status” is a big element of that.

Hope that was useful follow-on! And very glad you posted this request!

[Oshyan]

@B_Sp

• when you moved the status to a defined “in progress” state - and TP had a great multi-faceted Workflow that I hope gets to Fibery one day too, @mdubakov really tempted me about that here (have you seen @Oshyan?):

@mdubakov

@B_Sp Yeah, when we will create proper Kanban App in Fibery this should be done. In general Kanban MVP will require the following things:

1. Cycle/Lead Time calculation
2. Reports (CFD, CT distribution, CT change over time)
3. Groups of States on a board
4. WIP limits

That’s really cool, way more than I need, but great stuff.

@B_Sp

• then, a “date started” field was filled in automatically. So now you can see how long it took for you actually start when when you thought you’d start.
• when you move to a “completed” status, another date field called “actual completion date” fills in.

This would definitely be nice to have. I mean we can just maintain those date ranges ourselves now manually, right? But not having to do extra work to keep it all in sync would be very nice indeed.

[B_Sp]

@Oshyan

This would definitely be nice to have. I mean we can just maintain those date ranges ourselves now manually, right? But not having to do extra work to keep it all in sync would be very nice indeed.

You hit the nail on the head. My team can no way remember to do this themselves, and we wind up with those fields mostly empty unless I am able to go in and complete the fields, as the overworked admin, on behalf of my folks. So a real manual pain that I face daily without some kind of better Due Date/Automation handling in Fibery.

Cheers!

[Chr1sG]

I know that it’ll probably sound like a bit of hard work for something that would be nice to have ‘out-of-the-box’ but if you wanted to achieve this with Fibery already, you could have a (read-only) field for the status and have buttons to change state, and the buttons can also be made to update the needed date/time fields…
Just a thought.

[Chr1sG]

Using the API to make the workflow state read-only is pretty trivial
Then it’s just writing the scripts for a few buttons (‘Mark as In Progress’, ‘Mark as Done’, etc.) which will move through the states.
Once you define which date fields you want to be updated, then the rest is no problem either.
If you want help to do it, please drop me a line, and I can try to post some useful code here.

[Polina_Zenevich]

Hi, guys!
That is smth we hope will be possible pretty soon. As you know, we hope to focus on History as one of the Product Areas in Q1 2021, and that is smth we plan to implement as well as Activity Log.
Thanks for pointing this pain, all your votes are counted!