Timing your work
A timer captures time while you’re working, so you don’t have to reconstruct the day afterwards. You get one at a time, and it runs on our servers rather than in the page — closing the tab, or shutting the laptop, doesn’t stop it.
Starting and stopping
Start sits on an issue’s Time tracking panel and on each day of your timesheet. While it runs you can add a note, which saves as you type.
Stop ends it and writes the entry. A strip appears with the duration and note so you can correct either, but the entry already exists by then — that’s deliberate, and the next note says why.
The entry is written the moment you press Stop, before the strip appears. So the strip can be ignored, closed, or lost to a crashed tab and the time is still yours — the one way to lose it is to choose Discard.
Stop a timer within a minute of starting it and nothing is saved — it pauses instead and asks. A mis-click shouldn’t leave litter on your timesheet, and a stray two-minute entry is harder to notice than a missing one.
One timer at a time
Starting a timer while another is running switches you over: the first one stops, becomes an entry, and the new one starts. Because stopping writes an entry, that never happens silently — pressing Start opens the switch first, with the outgoing note editable in the same step, so you don’t have to go somewhere else to tidy up what you just left.
Cancel is always safe. The old timer keeps running, the new one doesn’t start, and nothing is half-done.
Pausing
Pause stops the clock. Resume starts it again, and the entry gets the time you actually banked rather than the span from Start to Stop.
What pausing doesn’t stop is the calendar. A timer paused at noon and forgotten is just as forgotten as one that ran all afternoon, so both are caught at the same hour — the paused one simply drafts the two hours it banked rather than eight. An admin can turn pausing off entirely, which makes the timer start and stop only.
Where the running timer shows
A pill in the app’s header carries the issue key, the elapsed time, and pause and stop. It follows you across My timesheet, Approvals, Reports and Settings, and clicking the key takes you to the row where the note lives.
The running time is also in your browser tab title, so a glance at the tab strip tells you the timer is going without switching to it. It reads (1h 12m) IS-3 · Calibro Track, and it uses whichever duration format you picked in Settings — so with decimal hours the same timer reads (1.2h) IS-3. It changes once a minute rather than once a second, because a tab title that flickers is harder to read than one that doesn’t.
It’s on unless you turn it off, and turning it off is Settings → Your preferences → Put the running timer in the browser tab title. That one is yours alone: no admin can set it for you, because what your own tab reads is nobody else’s decision. The pill in the header stays either way.
Apps built on Atlassian Forge can’t draw anything that persists across Jira’s own screens, so the pill lives on Calibro Track’s tabs and nowhere else, and the tab title only reads the timer while a Calibro Track tab is open. Browse to a board or an issue and both are gone — the timer is still running, and the issue panel still shows it. This is a platform limit rather than something we left out.
When you forget one
Timers get left running. Rather than pretend otherwise, the app escalates, and every step is set by your admin under Settings → Timer:
- At the warning point — four hours out of the box — the timer turns amber and asks once whether it’s still accurate. Keep running answers it, and it won’t ask again.
- At the cap — eight hours out of the box — the timer stops itself and writes a draft, flagged so you look at it.
A capped entry records the window the limit describes, not the moment somebody noticed. A timer started at 09:42 with an eight-hour cap becomes 09:42 → 17:42 whether you come back a minute later or the following Tuesday, so a laptop left shut for a week never drafts a week of work.
A timer that ran overnight
If a timer is still going on a later calendar day than it started, you get asked before anything is written. It offers the whole run, a shorter amount, or a figure you type — and it says plainly that nothing has been logged yet.
Entries a timer flags
When a timer writes an entry with nobody watching, it marks what it couldn’t ask you:
- Needs a note
- It stopped without the description your team requires.
- Check this
- The duration is the app’s guess rather than yours — a capped timer, usually.
A flagged entry is real time and is never thrown away, but it isn’t put in front of an approver either. It sits in the day and is counted out of every Submit until you settle it. Filling the note, or confirming the duration, clears the flag.
Switching it on flags entries made from then on. It does not light up every note-less entry in your site’s history, which would hand everybody a backlog they had no way to see coming.
A running timer is not time yet
Time that is still being timed appears in no total, no report and no approval queue. It becomes real when the timer stops and the entry exists — so a week total never counts hours you haven’t finished, and an approver is never shown a number that changes while they look at it.
Settings
Everything about the timer’s behaviour is one admin pane, Settings → Timer, and it applies to everyone.
Requiring a note is not one of them. It’s Require a description on every worklog in Team defaults, and it governs typed and timed entries alike — one rule about what an entry must carry rather than two that could disagree. The Timer pane points at it rather than repeating it, so nobody turns it on here believing they’ve turned it on for timers only.
For a timer that rule bites when you stop, never when you start, because a timer is there to capture the work first and describe it after.
The one timer setting that is yours rather than your admin’s is the browser tab title, which sits in Your preferences with the rest of the choices that only change your own view.