What is Outside Working Hours?
The Outside Working Hours metric shows how much work is being completed by team members outside of their typical working hours—such as during nights, weekends, or public holidays.
This includes activity like updating Jira issues, merging pull requests, commenting on code, or pushing commits during times that fall outside each team member’s defined working schedule.
This metric helps shine a light on patterns of overwork that may not be immediately visible in standard workflow metrics. It provides teams with early signals that can prompt conversations around capacity, work distribution, psychological safety, and the sustainability of current workloads.
Why is it important?
Working outside of regular hours occasionally is natural—especially when tackling urgent bugs, supporting global customers, or accommodating personal flexibility. But consistent or growing volumes of work during nights and weekends can be a sign of systemic issues, such as:
Unrealistic timelines or estimations
Uneven distribution of work
Unaddressed blockers during the day
Cultural norms that reward presenteeism over well-being
Tracking this metric helps teams proactively guard against burnout, identify areas where work can be rebalanced or de-scoped, and reinforce a healthy, sustainable delivery rhythm.
How Umano Visualises this?
The metric chart is set by default to tracking the aggregate activity undertaken outside working hours for all work items including Issues, Pull Requests, Chat Channel Interactions and Wiki page interactions.
You can select a particular work item to view activity only by Issues, for example, by using your Chart Filter Button positioned top left in your metric chart.
How is it calculated?
We calculate Outside Working Hours by identifying work-related activity (e.g., Jira issue transitions, pull request activity and comments, wiki page updates and comments, and chat messages) and determining whether it occurred:
Outside the working hours set for each team*
On weekends or public holidays (based on the region/timezone settings)
The metric aggregates this activity over the selected reporting period and shows the proportion of work done during those times compared to the total.
Example:
If team members create 10 pull requests in a week and 3 of those are on the weekend, then 30% of their commit activity occurred outside working hours.
*Note that the default working hours for a co-located team are 8am-6pm. Please get in touch with the Umano team via chat should you wish to customise this for your workspace.
What's Included?
Total number of activities during the interval
Number of activities outside working hours during the interval
Total number of activities during the interval per tool type (issue tracker, pull requests, wiki and chat)
Number of activities outside working hours during the interval per tool type (issue tracker, pull requests, wiki and chat)
What can I do with this insight?
This metric is not about policing, but about awareness and care. Here are a few actions to consider:
Spot burnout early: A sudden increase in out-of-hours work can signal someone is struggling to keep up.
Rebalance work: If certain team members are working out of hours more than others, it may be time to revisit workload distribution.
Revisit planning practices: Frequent out-of-hours activity might reflect scope creep, estimation issues, or unplanned work.
Support flexibility: In distributed or async teams, out-of-hours activity might reflect personal preferences. Open a dialogue to ensure it's by choice—not necessity.
Tips for getting the most out of this metric
Set clear working hours: Make sure each team member has their timezone and preferred working hours set correctly in your system.
Context matters: Use this metric alongside others like Sprint Stability, Planned vs Unplanned Work, or Time to Merge to understand if late hours are tied to bottlenecks or unplanned scope.
Normalize conversations: Don’t jump to conclusions. Instead, create psychological safety so team members feel safe to discuss what's driving their work patterns.
Celebrate balance: Make it a team goal to reduce unnecessary out-of-hours work and reward sustainable practices.