Daily Estimate

ActivityTimeline provides an additional way to estimate Jira tasks by using Daily Estimate.

Instead of relying only on Jira Remaining Estimate, or Story Points, you can define how many hours per day a user should spend on a task while it is scheduled on the timeline.

This is useful for teams that prefer daily planning or find it difficult to estimate the full task effort in advance.

When to Use Daily Estimate

Daily Estimate is useful when a task should reserve a fixed amount of time each day.

For example, instead of estimating a task as 20 hours total, you can plan it as 2 hours per day for the duration of the scheduled task.

This approach can be helpful for:

• tasks where effort is spread evenly across several days;

• teams that plan capacity in daily time blocks;

• cases where Story Points or fixed estimates are too high-level for resource planning.

Adding Daily Estimate to a Task

To add a Daily Estimate:

1. Open the Planner module.

2. Click any scheduled Jira issue.

3. Choose the Estimate option.

4. Select Daily Estimate.

5. Enter how many hours per day the user should spend on this task.

6. Click Submit.

Once added, the workload indicator will use the Daily Estimate when calculating the user’s workload

How Daily Estimate Affects Workload

When a task has a Daily Estimate, ActivityTimeline calculates workload based on the specified number of hours per day.

For example, if a task is scheduled for 5 days and has a Daily Estimate of 2 hours per day, ActivityTimeline calculates 2 hours of workload for each scheduled day.

If a task has both a Jira estimate, such as Remaining Estimate or Story Points, and a Daily Estimate, the Daily Estimate takes priority for workload calculation.

In this case:

• the hours-per-day value is shown on the task card;

• workload is calculated based on the Daily Estimate;

• the Jira estimate remains unchanged.

Daily Estimate and Jira Estimates 

Daily Estimate is stored in ActivityTimeline and is not connected to Jira issue estimate fields.

This means that Daily Estimate:

• does not update Jira Original Estimate;

• does not update Jira Remaining Estimate;

• is not displayed on the Jira issue page;

• is used by ActivityTimeline for workload and capacity planningю

Daily Estimate and Time Tracking Mode

Daily Estimate is not reduced by logged time in the same way as Jira Remaining Estimate.

If your team plans work mainly with Daily Estimate and does not rely on Remaining Estimate, an ActivityTimeline Administrator can switch the instance to:

General Configuration → Time Tracking Mode → Users do not log worked time

This mode keeps planned workload visible for past periods as well, including in planning reports.

It is especially useful when ActivityTimeline is used primarily for planning and capacity forecasting rather than actual time tracking.