Track time in status for monday.com items
Jun 23, 2025
Understanding how long items spend in each stage of your workflow is key to optimizing performance and spotting bottlenecks. Monday.com doesn't offer built-in time-in-status reporting out of the box, but with the right add-on, you can get powerful insights into your process. In this post, we’ll explore how to measure the time items spend in each status reliably, monitor work-in-progress timings, analyze cycle time trends, and break down durations by workflow step.
Contents:
How to measure items's time in status in list reliably?
Capturing the full cycle time of an item on a board can be done by observing the card transition history available via the monday.com API. However, some pitfalls should be avoided. To get accurate timings, you should take into account the following aspects:
What if the item skips statuses, or there is no sequential workflow?
What if an item is moved from the “not started” state directly to “done” without going through any of the “in progress” states?
How does the cycle time work if an item is moved into "in progress" and then back to "not started yet"?
What if an item is moved from "in progress" to "done", but then back to "in progress" again?
Should the out-of-office hours and weekends be included in the cycle time calculations?
Read on to learn how to visualise lead and cycle times of one or more monday.com items with various charts.
See timings for work in progress
To create a custom chart with Screenful, go to the Charts tab and click Add new chart in the top right corner. A modal is opened with a set of chart templates. You can either create a new chart from scratch or pick one of the predefined charts.
You can filter the template list using the top search box. Searching "timings" shows the charts related to the timing metrics. Click the first template called Timings for work in progress:
The resulting chart shows the current items in progress and how long they've been in progress so far:
The Time in progress column shows how long ago the work was started. The summary at the bottom shows the average time in progress across all items currently in progress.
You can configure the summary in the chart settings to display either sum, average, or median.
When you hover the mouse over the question mark, you see the movements between statuses:
On the tooltip, you see the status changes and how long the item stayed in each status. This view displays all the moves between states, including bounces backward in the workflow.
The rightmost column shows the timings per status:
The Timings by workflow state column shows the total time the item has spent in each status so far.
You can use the Task list chart to display the timings for any monday.com item.
See the trend of your cycle time
The Cycle time trend shows your cycle time over the selected date range. You can filter the data according to a label or a custom field to track a specific aspect of your work, such as leads, tasks, or support tickets. Timings are calculated from the completed items.
Cycle time is a measure of the elapsed time from the start of work on an item until it is marked as completed.
What can you do with that data? Let's consider a situation where your team is asked by business owners how long it takes to complete a specific task. Instead of just making a guess, the team can look at the data to see how long it has taken in the past to complete similar tasks and provide a data-driven estimate.
Another good way of visualising cycle times is by using a scatter plot, which presents data points in two dimensions according to the selected variables - cycle time and completion date.
Each circle corresponds to a completed item. The higher the circle, the longer it took to complete it. The horizontal axis is time. That allows you to visually see the outliers. For example, you can see how many items took more than 7 days to complete.
See the average time spent on each status
While it is helpful to know your overall cycle time and its trend, you may want to dig in deeper. The Cycle time per workflow state chart shows the average time spent on each status. The numbers represent the average time an item has stayed in that specific list in the selected period.
This chart tells you which steps in your workflow are the quickest and which are the slowest. For example, if items spend a lot of time waiting in some specific state, removing that delay would increase your throughput and overall delivery speed.
You can also track the cycle time trend of any individual status. Here's a line chart showing the trend for the In review status:
In this example, the review time has decreased by 38,5% during the selected time period, which is a positive trend. If the trend shifts and the review step starts to slow down, you might consider adding more QA resources or exploring alternative ways to reduce delays in that specific step.
Set working hours
When you create a chart using the Time in state unit, there is a checkbox only working hours. When selected, the chart will calculate the timing metrics from the working hours only.
The working hours can be specified in the Account settings:
You can select the working days (e.g. Monday to Friday) and the working hours (e.g. 08 to 16)
Create a cycle time report from a template
The quickest way to get the cycle time metrics is by using a report template. Go to the Reports tab and click Add new report:
A modal opens, showing the available templates. Select Timings report. You'll get a complete report containing the metrics introduced in this article.
The best thing is that each chart in the report is configurable so you can create the exact report you need.
About Screenful
Screenful provides multidimensional analytics of the data in monday.com. You can slice & dice your data with 15 different chart types, and click-through to drill into details.
Analytics & Reports by Screenful can be installed via the monday.com Apps Marketplace. Once installed, it adds an entry to the left menu that allows you to access your charts and reports within the Monday UI.
Let us know if you have questions or feedback by contacting hello@screenful.com. To stay on the loop, read our blog, or follow us on LinkedIn.
