# Read the board by age at the daily meeting Twelve cards in progress and eleven minutes. Rather than asking each person what they did yesterday, turn on **Aging colors** and walk the board from the oldest card down: the ones the board has painted are the ones whose forecast is slipping, and the ones it has left alone are fine by definition. The colors are not thresholds anybody typed in. Each card's age, meaning days since work on it actually started, is compared with the cycle times of work **of this board's own types, closed in its own projects** in the last 90 days. If that quarter holds fewer than ten closed items, the board looks over the last 12 months instead and says so, both in the strip's opening words and on a small `12 months` chip beside them. Analytics answers by type and by project, so the comparison is not bounded by the board's query: a second board over a different slice of the same types and projects sees the same distribution. ## Steps 1. Open the board and open the **⋯** menu in the header. Choose **Aging colors**. A line appears above the columns: *Closed in the last 90 days: 12*, followed by four chips, **50th**, **70th**, **85th** (tagged **SLE**) and **95th**, each showing an age such as *7d*. That is the distribution everything below it is being compared with. The 95th chip reads *n/a* until enough work has closed to support it, and hovering a chip says what it claims. 2. Read the painted cards from the top of the board down. Three steps, and they are steps rather than shades because each one is a different decision: - **past p50.** This card has already used more time than half of the finished work it is measured against. Worth a sentence at the daily meeting. - **past p70.** Roughly a coin flip whether it lands on time. The same sentence, now urgent. - **past p85.** The board can no longer tell you when it will finish. 3. Look at the column headers. A column that prints a second line, *p50 2d · p85 8d*, is comparing its cards with **that step's own history**: how long finished work has actually sat there. Those cards are being asked *is this step unusual?*, which is the more useful question, because it names a queue rather than accusing every column at once. A column without that line has too little history of its own and compares against the whole process instead. ![Two columns printing their own p50 and p85 under the column name, with cards banded against them](https://anykanban.com/docs/_img/aging-steps.png) 4. Hover a painted card's day counter. The tooltip says which comparison it is making. Measured against its column's history, it gives the card's age *in this step*. Measured against the whole process, it gives the time *in this state* and the time *since work started*. Each one ends with what to do next. Against the process, past p50 it asks whether the item can be swarmed, split, or unblocked; past p70 it says to swarm, split, or remove the blocker now; past p85 it says to finish the item. Against a step, past p50 it asks whether anything is blocking the card, past p70 it asks what the card is waiting for, and past p85 it says to look in that step for what is stuck. 5. Agree that move out loud, one painted card at a time. Then turn the mode off: it takes the color channel from your own card styling rules while it is on, and it is a view mode rather than a setting, so it clears itself when you open another board. ## Reading the same thing as a chart The **Aging WIP** tab beside **Board** and **List** plots every card in flight: its column across the bottom, its age up the side, and the same three lines drawn across. Use it when the question is *which of these three is worst* rather than *what are we doing instead of it*, and the board answers the second better, because the old card is sitting next to the work that happened in its place. Two pages cover it rather than a paragraph here: [Read the Aging WIP chart](https://anykanban.com/docs/find-and-analyze/read-the-aging-chart/) for what every mark on it means, and [What the chart is telling you](https://anykanban.com/docs/find-and-analyze/what-the-chart-is-telling-you/) for the shapes you will actually see and the move each one asks for. ## What you should see The first time the tab opens, a short **How to read this chart** panel floating on the chart, and a six-step walk-through behind it. Each step shows a small drawing of the thing it is describing and highlights the matching part of your own chart, so the lesson still works on a board that has nothing above the line yet, and on one whose work closes the same day it opens. Nothing is dimmed behind the panel: the chart stays readable and stays clickable while you read. It remembers that you closed it; the **?** in the toolbar brings it back, and offers the walk-through again. If your team has agreed a limit of its own, that limit wins **on this board** and the strip says so: a percentile describes what has happened, your limit is what you promised. On the **Aging WIP** tab it does not, because the lines there are always the measured distribution, and the limit shows up as a dashed outline around a card that has sat in its column past it. Two surfaces, two jobs: this one colors cards against your promise, that one draws the shape of the process. ## Notes Nothing here is configured, and nothing is stored on your device. The numbers come from your own organization's Analytics and are worked out in your browser. With fewer than ten items finished in the window there is no honest percentile, so the board says so and goes back to marking the card that has sat longest in each column, which needs no history at all. Between ten and thirty the numbers are shown and marked **provisional**. A Stakeholder-licensed viewer, an organization without Analytics or a rate-limited minute each get a sentence in that same strip; the board itself keeps working. Days are calendar days, and the clock does not stop while a card is blocked. That is deliberate: waiting is the thing this whole view exists to surface. ## Related - [Read the Aging WIP chart](https://anykanban.com/docs/find-and-analyze/read-the-aging-chart/) - [What the chart is telling you, and what to do about it](https://anykanban.com/docs/find-and-analyze/what-the-chart-is-telling-you/) - [Why percentiles instead of averages](https://anykanban.com/docs/concepts/why-percentiles-not-averages/) - [Find one item on a board of four hundred](https://anykanban.com/docs/find-and-analyze/find-one-item/) - [See which work is waiting on other work](https://anykanban.com/docs/find-and-analyze/see-what-waits-on-what/)