Stale tasks are now left out of metrics

From 14 October 2026, every metric leaves out stale items: tasks, bugs, epics, milestones and custom task types that spent more than 12 months in a single status that is not in your Completed stage. Time spent in a status is added up across every visit. The filter, how to change the limit and how to see each hidden item are described in Hide stale tasks from every metric.

Your data did not change; what counts did. Tasks forgotten in a tracker for years were being measured as if someone had worked on them all that time. Once someone closed one, its years of waiting landed in that week's cycle time and lead time.

We do not put a size on these changes: it depends on how many forgotten items your tracker holds. To compare with a figure you reported earlier, switch the Stale tasks filter off. The numbers then come out exactly as before.

What moves, and which way

• Lead time, cycle time and their percentiles go down, or stay the same. The forgotten items had the longest times, so averages fall most. Percentiles move less.
• Hours go down. This covers active and calendar hours, hours per story point and the Workflow Bottleneck Detector's status times. Statuses that mostly held forgotten tasks, typically "Open", "Created" or "To do", can drop out of the top of the Bottleneck Detector altogether.
• Counts go down slightly. This covers tasks completed, tasks without story points and story points delivered, when a forgotten item was closed in the period.
• Team parallelism usually goes up. Parallelism is total active time divided by the span of calendar time in which work was active. A single task left "In progress" for years stretched that span back to when it started, so the ratio understated how many tasks people actually work on at once.
• Cost moves between phases, while total payroll stays the same. Cost is payroll spread over the work done. When forgotten items leave, their share goes to the remaining work. Analysis or development cost can then shrink while review or design grows, and cost per story point can move either way.
• Delivery Pace and the estimation baselines change. Both the current period and the history it is compared with lose their forgotten items. The history often loses more, so the pace comparison can move noticeably in either direction.
• The Health score, milestone and planning forecasts, Project Cost, DORA's ClickUp-based numbers, exports, AI reports and MCP answers all follow the same rule, so they move in line with the metrics above.

Things to know

• Each item is judged on its own. Hiding an epic or a milestone does not hide the tasks under it. A hidden parent's estimated children count in its place.
• The rule looks at each item's whole history up to today. An item still sitting in a status keeps adding time, so it can cross the limit later. When it does, it leaves past periods too, and a figure for a closed period can change a little after you reported it. A Planning commitment keeps the size it had when it was committed.
• Statuses outside your Completed stage count as waiting. If your workflow ends in statuses such as Pass, Fail or Skip that are not in the Completed stage, add them to Completed in Status Config. Otherwise items resting there are treated as stuck.
• The default is 12 months, on for everyone. You can change the limit, or set a limit per task type, on any View, and switch it off entirely.

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