Flow Efficiency is the ratio of active time to total time (active + waiting) for completed tasks. It tells you what share of an item's lifecycle was spent doing real work versus sitting in a queue.
What it measures
For each completed item: how long it spent in active workflow states divided by its total cycle duration (active + waiting).
How Leanmote calculates it
flow_efficiency = active_time / (active_time + waiting_time)
Reported as a percentage. 100% means zero waiting; 0% means nothing was actively worked on.
Computed once over the totals, not per item: the team's active time and waiting time are each summed across completed items, and the ratio is taken on those sums. A handful of long-waiting items therefore weigh more than they would in an average of per-item ratios.
Active vs. waiting state classification comes from your workflow mapping.
How to interpret it
15–40% — typical for healthy software teams. Most items spend more time waiting (review, QA, deploy) than being actively worked.
Below 15% — the system is mostly queueing. Look at where waiting concentrates and target that stage.
Above 50% — unusually low waiting; verify the workflow mapping isn't classifying review/QA states as active.
What to do about it
Improve Flow Efficiency by attacking the largest waiting bucket — usually review pickup or QA queue.
Don't try to push it to 100%. Real systems have batching costs; a healthy review process is supposed to take some time.
Pair with Cycle Time. Improving Flow Efficiency without reducing Cycle Time means you've found a definition issue, not a process win.
Related metrics
Cycle Time
Total Waiting Time
Total Active Time
Bottleneck Insights dashboard