How do I track time without a 40 hour work week?

Question

I am on a project with friends, where I had hoped to use JIRA's etimates and logging to figure out how good we are at estimating and how lokng we spent on those tasks. We hope to scale this project eventually to full time if we get funding, and to craft a budget, we're figuring out these details.

But the thing is JIRA assumes we're working 40 hours work weeks. So if my colleague estimates 40 hours, takes 38, but across 2 weeks of his free time, then JIRA forces him to add a start date, which massively inflates his hours.

In fact, a 40 hour estimate gets immediatly converted to 1 week. I thought about disabling time tracking, but found no way to do so. I was hoping to use JIRA to get more robust info than Trello but maybe it's just not "personal project" friendly.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Sara Marques

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

In the global settings for time tracking you can define the number of working days per week and working hours per day. This is a global setting so it would affect all projects using time estimations.

With the Free subscription that is the only native option available related to your requirement.

Mariana Silveira Sales · Answer

Hi @Sara Marques

Option 1: Instead of relying on Jira's calculated time, you can log the actual hours spent without worrying about start dates or dates spanning multiple weeks.

-> In the "Time Spent" field, input the total hours you worked (e.g., 38h) and select any Start Date.

Jira may still calculate from start to finish based on the date you logged the time, but this won’t affect the actual logged hours.

-> Compare Estimates vs. Logged Time:

Jira will track the total time logged against the original estimate. You can focus on these values instead of worrying about how Jira spreads those hours across weeks.

Option 2: You can customize the "working hours" and "working days" under Time Tracking settings.

Go to Jira Settings → Issues → Time Tracking.
Set the "Hours per day" and "Days per week" to reflect how your team typically works (e.g., 20 hours per week if everyone is working on it part-time)

You can also disable Time tracking in this menu.