Waiting Time is the accumulated time items spend parked rather than being worked on. It's the most direct way to surface workflow friction.
What it measures
The hours items sat in a status your board maps to the Waiting category, summed across the items the team completed in the period. Work still in flight contributes nothing until it finishes.
How Leanmote calculates it
Leanmote walks each completed item's status history and adds up every stretch that began in a Waiting status:
Status category | Counts toward Waiting Time? |
Backlog (0) | No |
Active (1) | No — that's Active Time |
Waiting (2) | Yes |
Done (3), Cancelled (4) | No |
There is no built-in list of "waiting" state names. Leanmote does not look for
blockedorqa_pending; it looks at the category you assigned to each status in the board status mapping. A status named "Blocked" that you mapped to Active counts as active work.Stretches are clipped to the window you selected, so an item that waited across the boundary contributes only the part inside it.
The average divides by every completed item, including the ones that never waited at all.
The metric is reported as a total and an average, both in hours. It is not reported as a percentage of cycle time — the percentage view is a separate metric, Flow Efficiency, which is active ÷ (active + waiting) and lives in Strategic Overview.
How to interpret it
Compare Waiting Time against Active Time on the same items. If waiting dwarfs active, the system is mostly queueing and the fix is in the process, not in the coding.
If Waiting Time is rising while Cycle Time is rising, the bottleneck is in a passive status.
Localize by stage. The status with the longest waiting share is the highest-leverage target.
What to do about it
If review is the longest wait: shorten review pickup time, set SLAs, distribute reviewer load.
If QA is the longest wait: invest in test automation and pre-merge quality gates.
If deploy is the longest wait: deploy more often or remove manual gates.
Cap WIP — fewer items in flight means less waiting per item.
If the number looks wrong
The most common cause is mapping, not measurement. A status nobody categorized, or one categorized as Active when the team treats it as a queue, moves hours from one bucket to the other. Check the board status mapping before concluding the workflow changed.
Related metrics
Active Time
Cycle Time
Flow Efficiency — the same two numbers expressed as a ratio
Work in Progress (WIP)
Bottleneck Insights dashboard