Core How-Tos

Use the Parking Lot on your board

Standup is for quick status. The Parking Lot is a floating note pad that sits on your Jira board and catches everything else — the tangent, the design question, the thing two people need to sort out afterwards — so it gets written down instead of eating the meeting.

Where it lives

The Parking Lot is a floating panel on your Jira boards, on by default and collapsed until you open it. Click its header to expand it, and click again to collapse.

Drag it by the header to move it anywhere on screen, and drag the note's corner to resize. It remembers where you put it and how big you made it, so it's in the same place at tomorrow's standup.

Take a note

Click into the pad and type. There's no save step — your notes are stored as you write and are still there when you come back to the board.

Because notes are saved to your browser profile's synced storage, they follow you to the other Chrome windows you're signed into.

Quick-insert phrases

Most parked items fall into the same few buckets, so the pad has an Insert… dropdown that appends a standard phrase to your notes in one click. It ships with a starter set:

  • 2nd Half of Stand Up
  • 15min Meeting Followup
  • Team Meeting Topic
  • Slack Thread Discussion
  • 1on1 Meeting

Make them your own in Settings → Parking Lot → Quick-insert phrases — one phrase per line. Changes reach any Jira tab you already have open straight away, and Reset to defaults brings the starter set back.

Saved templates

If your team runs the same agenda every time, set the pad up once and press the save button on the panel to keep it as a template. Reload it any time from the pad's Load template… menu — handy for starting each standup from a clean, pre-structured note.

Templates you no longer want can be deleted under Settings → Parking Lot → Saved templates.

Set a focus message

The focus message is a short subtitle shown under the Parking Lot title — and, importantly, it stays visible even when the pad is collapsed, so the team's ground rules stay in front of everyone. The default reads:

“Standup is for quick status — what you did, what's next, and blockers. We will park anything else here for deeper discussion.”

Rewrite it under Settings → Parking Lot → Focus message. Line breaks and basic markdown work — **bold**, *italic*, - lists, and links. Leave it blank to hide the subtitle entirely, or use Reset to default to restore the original wording.

Sizing and colour

  • Note size — scale the note text under Settings → Parking Lot → Note size, independently of the subtask text on your board.
  • Subtitle size — the focus message has its own scale control, so you can make it prominent or keep it quiet.
  • Colour — under Settings → Appearance → Custom colors, Custom background sets the surface colour for the extension's floating panels (the Parking Lot, tooltips, and buttons) on dark Jira themes, and Custom focus message sets the subtitle's colour.

Turning it off

If you'd rather not have the pad on your boards, switch off Show Parking Lot under Settings → Parking Lot. Your notes, phrases, and templates are all kept — turn it back on and everything reappears exactly as you left it. The change applies to open Jira tabs right away.

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