Bring your tickets with you: the Plane integration, and what comes next

Most people who track their time already have a list of what to work on, and it is not in their time tracker. It is in Plane, or Jira, or Linear, kept by a team, with ticket numbers everyone uses in conversation. Then the timer asks "what are you working on?" and the answer gets typed a second time, slightly differently, by someone who is busy.

That small duplication is where tracked time goes wrong. "Fix the banner", "banner fix" and "TW-12" turn out to be the same work, logged three ways, and on Friday nobody can add them up. So the first rule of integrations in Timato is simple: a task should arrive from the tool where it was planned, under the name everyone already knows.

Plane is the first tool that works this way. This post covers what it does, how to set it up, and what is coming after it.

What the Plane sync does

Connect a Plane workspace, choose which of its projects to bring in, and every open work item arrives in Timato as a task named after its ticket: "TW-12 Fix the banner", with a link back to the ticket. From then on Timato keeps up with Plane on its own.

• What arrives: every work item in Todo, In Progress and Testing, whoever it is assigned to. Backlog and triage stay in Plane until they are actually on the go.
• What follows Plane: a ticket marked Done or Cancelled ticks its task off, and moving it back reopens the task. A rename renames the task. A ticket that is deleted or archived in Plane removes its task, but the time already logged on it stays.
• What stays Timato's: the estimate, the labels and the notes. They are yours to add and the sync never touches them.
• When: every ten minutes, on our server, whether Timato is open or not. When you cannot wait, there is a Sync button.

The sync runs one way. Plane is the source of truth and Timato never changes a ticket: no status moved behind your back, no comment added, nothing written to your workspace at all.

Setting it up

You need a Timato account and a Personal plan (or Team, for shared projects), because the sync runs on our server rather than in your browser. That is what lets tickets keep arriving while Timato is closed.

1. Get a Plane key. In Plane, open Profile settings › Personal access tokens and create one.

2. Connect. In Timato, go to Settings › Integrations and connect Plane with your workspace's slug (the part after app.plane.so/ in its address) and the key. Running your own Plane? Tick "Self-hosted Plane" and give its https address. Timato tries the key against Plane before saving it, so a typo shows up straight away rather than as a failed sync later.

3. Choose where each project goes. For every project in the workspace, pick one of three:

• A new Timato project, named after it. This is the default.
• An existing project, if you already track that work in Timato. When a project with the same name exists, it is suggested.
• Skip it, for projects you do not work on.

Save, and the first sync runs at once. A project added to Plane later shows up as "New" in the same list until you decide where it goes.

Several workspaces

People who work for more than one client often have more than one Plane workspace. Each one is its own connection, with its own projects, its own Sync now and its own Disconnect. Plane's keys belong to a person rather than a workspace, so when you add a second one Timato offers to reuse the key you already gave it. Untick that to paste a different one.

For a team

On the Team plan, owners and admins see a second card, "Plane for" followed by the team's name. It works the same way, but feeds the team's shared projects. Everyone on the team can see those tasks and claim them, and anyone on the team can press the project's Sync. The key belongs to the admin who pasted it, and goes with them if they leave the team.

Using it day to day

Once the tasks are there, nothing about the rest of Timato changes, which is the point.

• Start the timer on a ticket. Type the ticket number into the goal field ("TW-12") and pick the task, or choose Start timer here on the task in Projects. The session is logged against the ticket's task, under the name your team uses.
• See where a project's tasks come from. A synced project shows one quiet line under its name, "From Plane · sidewind/TW · synced 10:15", with a Sync button beside it.
• Reopening a done ticket. If you start the timer on a task whose ticket is done in Plane, Timato asks before reopening it, and warns you that the next sync will tick it off again unless the ticket moves in Plane too. Plane decides; Timato just reminds you.
• Agents. A coding agent connected to Timato can log its work by ticket key alone ("start work on TW-12"), and if the ticket has not arrived yet, Timato fetches it from Plane first. Its time sits beside yours on the same task. The guide to working with coding agents covers the setup.

What happens to your key

A Plane key opens your workspace, so it is treated accordingly. It is encrypted before it is stored, it is never sent back to the browser (Settings shows only its last four characters), and it is used for reading and nothing else. Disconnect deletes it at once. The tasks that came from Plane stay as ordinary tasks, with their history.

If your plan lapses, the connection pauses rather than disappearing. Renew, and it carries on from where it stopped.

What comes next

Plane was first because it is what we use ourselves, and a sync you do not depend on daily is a sync that breaks quietly. The pieces underneath it, the encrypted keys, the ten-minute schedule, the project choices and the way tasks are written, were built to be shared with the next tool. This is the order we plan to add things in. There are no dates on it, on purpose.

Plane, done better. Two things are next for Plane itself:

• Instant updates. Plane can notify Timato the moment a ticket changes, instead of Timato asking every ten minutes.
• Time back in Plane. Today the sync only reads. The plan is to send the time you log back to the ticket as a Plane work log, so the time lives where the ticket does. Writing to your workspace is a bigger step than reading it, so this is meant to be something you switch on, not something that starts on its own.

Jira. Jira is the next tool. Issues will sync the same way, by status category rather than by status names, which differ in every Jira instance, and the time you log will be able to go back as Jira worklogs. Settings › Integrations then becomes a short list of tools to connect, rather than a Plane card.

Then the rest. After Jira come the other popular tools: Linear, GitHub Issues, Asana and the like. Which comes first depends on who asks. If yours is on that list, or missing from it, use Send feedback in Timato (Settings › About, or the small envelope in the corner of every screen) and tell us which one.

The rules will not change from tool to tool: the tool you plan in stays the source of truth, nothing is changed there without you switching it on, and a task arrives once, under the name your team already uses.