Getting started
Last updated: 18 September 2026
OnTask is two things in Jira Cloud, built on Atlassian Forge: a personal work clock, and a view of the time people logged in Jira. Focus opens onto the work already assigned to you, ranked by what is actually urgent; you start a clock on one thing; and stopping it writes a native Jira worklog, authored by you. Team shows the time the people you pick logged in Jira, day by day, within what Jira lets you see. It has no AI.
There is no manager role and no privileged view. Everyone sees the same Team tab, each person sees only what their own Jira permissions already allow, and nobody gets a view of someone that the person's own colleagues could not also open. The tab never shows the comment text on a worklog, which is where the summary you type when you stop the clock goes unless you turn that off. OnTask's own records about you — your ranking and its score, your settings, the summaries you wrote about your own work, your session history and your saved views — are never shown to another person. What the Team tab shows is Jira worklogs, which Jira already shows that viewer.
OnTask stores what it needs inside your own Atlassian site and makes no network calls outside Atlassian.
How you get it
From the Atlassian Marketplace. A Jira site administrator installs it with Try it free, which starts Atlassian's 30-day free trial.
It is free for sites with up to 10 users, and USD 2 per user per month above that; an annual subscription costs ten times the monthly price. Atlassian bills and invoices you under your own agreement with them — see Support.
What you need
- Jira Cloud. OnTask is a Forge app and runs only on Jira Cloud. There is no Server or Data Center build.
- A Jira site admin to install it, and to approve the permission scopes at install time.
- Issues assigned to you. OnTask ranks your open, assigned work. With nothing assigned it still runs — see Nothing assigned to you below.
The app asks for these scopes at install:
| Scope | What it's for |
|---|---|
read:jira-work | Read your assigned issues, their fields, comments (to spot unanswered mentions) and existing worklogs; check that you may log work on an issue. On the Team tab, find the issues the people you picked logged work on, read those worklogs, and check whether you may browse users, so the people search can explain its results |
write:jira-work | Create the worklog you confirm, and the optional issue comment. Only ever from the stop screen, only after you press Log it; nothing writes in the background |
read:jira-user | Your own profile — the timezone a worklog's start time and the Team tab's days need, and your name and avatar on the Team tab; whether an account still exists, which drives automatic erasure; and on the Team tab, finding people to add and looking up their names and avatars |
storage:app | Keep the running clock, your session history, preferences and saved Team views in Forge hosted storage on your site |
report:personal-data | Atlassian's Personal Data Reporting API — required because account IDs are stored. See Data & privacy |
There is no external-egress permission and no remote host in the app's manifest, and the Marketplace listing carries Atlassian's Runs on Atlassian badge.
Where OnTask lives in Jira
Two places.
Apps → OnTask in the left sidebar. The page has two tabs. Focus is the dashboard: your ranked work, the clock, what you logged today, and Settings. Team shows the time people logged in Jira, per day — see Team timesheet. The Team tab is on for everyone who can use OnTask, and there is no switch to turn it off. Looking at colleagues' logged time is workplace monitoring: your organisation is the controller of that data, needs a lawful basis for it, and must tell its staff where the law requires it — see Data & privacy.
On every issue, an OnTask panel in the issue view. Start a clock on the issue you are already looking at, pause and stop it, or log time you already spent — without going to the dashboard.
Both surfaces share one clock. Start it on the dashboard and the issue panel shows it running; stop it from the panel and the dashboard's Today list updates.
Your first look
Open Apps → OnTask and the Focus tab. It reads your open, assigned issues from Jira and shows three cards — the three that score highest. Under each one:
- Why this one — score N. Open it and you see the arithmetic: which signals contributed how many points. It is not a summary of the score; it is the score. See How the ranking works.
- Start on this. Starts the clock.
Under the cards, Show me the next three pages through the rest of your queue; Back to the top returns to the first three.
The right-hand column has two lists:
- Waiting on you — issues where someone mentioned you in a comment and you have not replied on the issue since. This is derived from the comment thread, so it is an observation, not an accusation: if you answered in a pull request or in chat, the issue will still be listed.
- Today — What you logged — every session you logged through OnTask today, with a running total.
Nothing assigned to you
If Jira has no open issues assigned to you, the dashboard says so and offers Log time on anything — pick any issue by key or by a fragment of its summary, and log time to it. The issue panel works regardless of assignment.
Start, stop, log
- Start on this (a card) or Start a timer (the issue panel). The clock runs; the page title shows the elapsed time, so you can see it from another tab.
- Pause when you are interrupted. Paused time is not counted. Resume when you are back.
- Stop & log. The stop screen opens with the time filled in — edit it if that's not right — and asks for a one-line summary of what you did.
- Log it. OnTask writes a Jira worklog, as you, for that duration. Your summary goes in as the worklog's comment if the switch is on.
Optionally the same screen can also post your summary as an issue comment. That switch is off by default — comments notify everyone watching the issue — and when it is on, the screen shows who will be notified and previews the comment byte for byte. Nothing is rewritten.
Right after logging, an Undo on the confirmation removes that worklog again. Discard stops the clock without writing anything.
The details — how the clock survives a closed laptop, what "left running" does, the manual entry path, the day-crossing check — are in The clock & worklogs.
Settings
At the bottom of the dashboard, Settings & privacy holds everything OnTask lets you change: whether the comment switch starts on or off, the daily total that triggers a one-time confirm, the six sliders that tune the ranking to how you work, and the buttons that delete your data. A site administrator additionally sees a switch that turns OnTask comments off for the whole site.
Apart from that site-wide switch, settings are yours alone. Changing one affects nobody else, and a setting you have never changed follows OnTask's default.