How I Plan, Track, and Report My Work in Jira

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I think most of us are already very familiar with calendar-based planning even if we’ve never actually called it that.

You quickly add a colleague’s birthday so you don’t forget it. You put your kids’ swimming classes and other activities on the calendar so you can rush there as soon as office hours are over, in the eternal pursuit of doing it all and being a good parent. You schedule doctor’s appointments, gym classes, and all those other attempts to take care of yourself somewhere between everything else.

So, when I joined BrizoIT and started working with One Calendar for Jira, the transition felt surprisingly easy and natural. I was already using a calendar to organize my life so why not organize my work in the same way?

Your memory is not a recording device

A typical workday is already full of different tasks, responsibilities, meetings, routines, and those small “this will only take five minutes” things that somehow keep appearing throughout the day. And your memory is not a recording device.

When you constantly switch between tasks, remembering exactly what you worked on and for how long can become difficult. Then, at the end of the day or week, reporting that work turns into an investigation of your own activity.

For me, dividing the day into calendar blocks, with every block representing a particular type of work, turned out to be a very natural solution.

I’m a Marketing Manager, and my workday rarely consists of one task or even one type of work. I can switch from writing content to reviewing something, planning a campaign, having a meeting, preparing materials, checking results, or handling one of those small-but-important tasks that doesn’t deserve its own afternoon but still needs to get done. Seeing all of this on a calendar gives me a much clearer picture of where my time actually goes.

Understanding your time makes planning easier

There’s another benefit I noticed pretty quickly: when you can see how you spend your time, you start understanding your workload much better. That makes it easier to distribute work realistically instead of planning based on how long you think something should take.

Over time, you also become better at estimating your work because you have actual experience to rely on. You know that a certain task usually takes an hour, another needs three, and that “quick little update” may not, in fact, be quite as quick as you keep telling yourself.

And then there’s reporting. When your work is already represented in your calendar, reporting becomes much easier. There are fewer memory gaps, and you can account for the time you spent throughout the day without trying to reconstruct everything afterward.

We all know that some tasks are small but that doesn’t make them unnecessary. With calendar-based worklogging, those smaller tasks are much less likely to disappear from your reports simply because you forgot about them.

So, what does my calendar actually look like?

Let me share a little bit about my workflow and give you a glimpse into what my work calendar actually looks like. First, I’ll start with the calendar sources that bring different types of events into my calendar.

Worklogs. This is the obvious one. I have Worklogs configured for all Jira projects I have access to. I’ve also configured the fields displayed on the calendar so I can immediately understand what each worklog is about. For me, those are: Key, Work description, Summary, Status, Duration. But this is very individual, you can choose the fields that make the most sense for your workflow.

I’m a very visual person, so color-coding makes a big difference for me. I color-code my worklogs based on their status or certain words in the summary, like “meeting,” for example. It helps me look at my calendar and immediately understand what my day was made up of.

Reminders. I use a custom source for reminders and plans. These are useful for things I want to keep visible on my calendar without necessarily turning everything into a Jira work item.

Assigned Jira work. This source is also configured across all the projects I have access to, using Start date – Due date as the time fields. These items appear in the panel above my time grid as all-day events. This way, I can clearly see the Jira work that is relevant for the day or week.

Google Calendar. And, of course, work doesn’t exist in complete isolation from the rest of life. I integrated my Google Calendar so I can see my personal plans and appointments alongside my work schedule. It helps me avoid planning an ambitious 4:30 PM work session only to discover that 4:30 PM is exactly when I’m supposed to be somewhere else. 

And when it’s time to report...

At the end of the week, when it’s time to hand in my work report, I simply go to the Reports option in the calendar and generate it in a few seconds.

Reports are configurable, so you can create the format you need, add the relevant fields, and save it as a template. Then, whenever management asks for a report, or you need one for billing, you don’t have to build it again from scratch.

And that’s probably one of my favorite parts of this workflow: reporting doesn’t require me to reconstruct my week. The work is already there. A few clicks, an Excel file, and my weekly report is ready.

My preferred calendar view

I use Time Grid in Weekly mode. For me, this gives the right balance between detail and perspective. I can see the work I’ve already completed, understand how my time was distributed, and at the same time see what’s planned for the rest of the week.

I also keep Saturdays and Sundays visible on my calendar just in case I need to cut my workday short to rush to a school event for my kid and catch up on work over the weekend. Of course, if that’s not your case, you can always hide them and enjoy a clean Monday–Friday view.

Instead of having planning, actual work, worklogs, Jira tasks, and personal commitments living in completely separate places, I get one visual timeline of my week. And perhaps that’s why the transition felt so easy to me.

I didn’t really have to learn a completely new way of organizing my work. I simply took a planning method I had already been using in everyday life and applied it to my workday.

For me, the calendar is no longer just a tool for keeping track of my appointments. It has become a platform that gives me a clear picture of my workday—what’s planned, what’s done, where my time actually went, and how much work I have ahead of me.

If any of this sounds familiar, feel free to try One Calendar for Jira and see how calendar-based planning fits into your own workflow.

There’s also One Calendar Free, which comes with some limitations but can be a great starting point for small teams that want to give calendar-based planning and work tracking a try.