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Read a card's age at a glance

Next to every card's state there is a small counter, 5d, saying how long the card has sat in its current state. It is on by default, it colors nothing, and its whole job is the daily question: which card have we stopped moving?

Before you start

Nothing. The counter reads State Change Date, a system field every hosted process already has on every type, so there is no field to create and no setting to fill in. A named board can turn it off under Settings → Cards → Fields (Show time in current state on cards).

Days, or hours, or minutes: the board decides

The counter says 5d on most boards because most work takes days. A board where everything starts and finishes inside a single day would read 0d on every card, which tells you nothing at all, so such a board counts in hours instead, and one faster still in minutes. The unit is read from your own durations, there is nothing to configure, and the whole board uses one unit: the counter, the Aging WIP chart's axis and every tooltip always agree.

The work in motion gets the first say: the age of started, unfinished cards and the time cards spend in columns where work is moving. How long a finished card has been lying in Done, or a request has been waiting in New, does not pick the unit, because otherwise a fast board would be dragged back to days by every item that lingers after (or before) the work. Their counters still show, in the board's unit, so a request three days deep in New reads 72h on a board of hours, a big number on exactly the card someone should pick up. Only a board with nothing in motion at all, a pure intake, say, before anything is picked up, takes its unit from whatever it does show.

The scale follows the slowest work, not the fastest. If people and something quicker work side by side on one board, it stays in days, and the fast work gathers into a single countable point near zero rather than a smear.

One thing deliberately stays in days wherever you see it: a limit you set, and the @Today macros in style rules. Those are numbers you wrote, not measurements we took.

What the number means, and what it does not

"Age" can mean three different numbers, and confusing them leads to wrong conclusions about your own process. The counter is the first of these:

Two edges worth knowing, because they are exactly where the first two numbers disagree:

Hover the counter: the tooltip restates the definition, so nobody has to have read this page to interpret the number.

Turning on the aging view

Open the ⋯ menu in the board header and choose Aging colors. The menu offers it while the counter is on, and the entry says beside its name what it does to your rules: Pauses your card color rules. While the mode is on, cards are tinted by how unusual their age is, and your own card color rules stand down for the duration, because the highlight uses the same tint your rules do, so the two never compete for one card and what you are looking at is unambiguous. Turn it off and your rules come straight back. The colored strip down the left of a card is not involved: that always means the work item type.

Nothing moves. The order of cards in a column is your order, and the mode does not touch it. Age is a color here, never a position.

What a card is compared with depends on what the board can measure, and the history comes from the Analytics service. A column with enough history of its own compares its cards with how long finished work has spent in that step, and prints p50 and p85 under its name. Every other column compares each card with the work of the board's own types closed in the last 90 days, or over 12 months when that quarter holds fewer than ten closed items. Read the board by age at the daily meeting walks through reading those colors.

When there is too little history

If Analytics cannot be read, or too few items have closed to compare against, the line above the columns says so and the board marks the card that has sat longest in each column instead. That mark is deliberately narrow: this one has been here longest. It is a comparison with the cards in that column right now, not with the column's history and not with any target. The exact number is on the card already, in the counter; the color only points.

That narrowness explains three things people ask about:

If a column is showing only its first page, the longest-sitting card may be behind Show more, and until it is on screen that column marks nothing rather than promoting the oldest card you happen to be looking at.

If your team has agreed a limit

By default the view needs no number from you, and that is the point: most teams do not know their own numbers, which is why flow metrics exist at all.

If yours has agreed one, say "a step should not take more than five days", put it in Settings → Cards → Fields, under Highlight cards at this many days or more. The box sits directly under Show time in current state, the switch it qualifies. The view then marks every card at or over it, instead of comparing cards with measured history or with each other, and the line above the columns says the limit is in force.

That is a different statement, and a stronger one: it says these have broken the promise we made, so marking several cards is right rather than noisy. It also says something in a column where everything is equally and badly old, where the "longest" mark is honestly silent.

Two things to expect. The limit applies to every column, including your last one, so cards that have simply been finished for a while will be marked; if your last column means "ready to deploy" that is exactly what you want, and if it means "archived" you may prefer no limit. And the number is your promise, not a measurement. The product will never invent one for you. While a limit is set, it takes the place of the measured comparison on this board. Clear it to have Aging colors compare cards with what your process actually does, rather than what you hoped it would, as described in Read the board by age at the daily meeting.

The box is always visible, never behind an expander: a board that behaves unusually should say so on the way in, and the surest way to manage that is to leave the setting on screen.

When there is no counter

If the board's work item type does not carry the State Change Date field, which is possible on old on-premises XML process models, the board says so in a message bar and shows no counters, rather than showing badges with nothing in them. Every hosted process has the field on every type.