The smart way to clean up Jira Projects without breaking anything 🤓☝️💡

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Stop me if you’ve heard this before. 

Your Jira project started neatly. 

Then, someone said, "Let’s create a quick work item to track this."

Then, someone else said, "We need a custom field for that."

Then, the intern added 300 tasks for reasons nobody could quite explain.

Now your Jira project is in chaos. Half your work items are untouched, the other half are probably inaccurate. 

We’ve all been there. 

Why Jira clutter is more than just ugly 🫣

An untidy Jira project does so much more than just irritate your inner Marie Kondo.

It slows down progress, buries key work items under piles of irrelevant ones, makes reports unreliable, and clogs up filters. Worse still, your Jira project optimization efforts get sidelined by the mess. Reporting suffers. Sprint planning drags. The team loses confidence in the system meant to help them. 

Before long, the mess is so overwhelming that even fixing it feels like a risk. One well-intentioned bulk delete Jira work item attempt could accidentally wipe out crucial tasks, derailing everything.

So what do you do?

Start by spotting red flags 🚩

You don’t have to tackle your messy mountain of a Jira work item cleanup all at once.

Start by spotting the elephants in the room.

Look for work items that haven’t been updated in months. If a task hasn’t moved for ages, chances are it’s not coming back. You can use filters to find work items in an open status with no assignee or no comments.

Next, check for duplicate or unclear work items. These usually come with vague titles like “Fix bug” or “Button not working.” Talk to the team before deleting anything, but mark them clearly so they don’t keep getting picked up.

Then, review your custom fields. It’s common to have fields that were created for one-off projects and never used again. Go to Jira’s custom field settings and sort by use. If a field appears in zero screens or contexts, it’s time to let it go.

Finally, look at projects or boards that are no longer active. These are prime spots for clutter and should be archived or deleted accordingly.

Just don’t feel overwhelmed! Cleanup is a process, not a one-time event after all.

Can Jira handle the cleanup?

Technically, yes.

You can write JQL queries to find old or untouched work items. You can use bulk edit to close, delete, or reassign them. You can dive into custom field and status settings to check what’s actually being used or ignored for months.

If you're managing twenty work items, these approaches will work fine.

But when you're dealing with hundreds, or worse, a Jira instance that’s grown wild over the years, these methods start to feel painfully manual. There’s no unified view. No quick way to sort or scan while editing. And if you’re trying to untangle custom fields that number in the hundreds, good luck doing that through the standard interface.

The tools are certainly there. It’s just that they’re not built for speed, scale, or peace of mind.

A better way to clean house (without fighting Jira)

Jira’s built-in tools are powerful, but when it comes to large-scale cleanup, they can feel like more work than they should be. If you’ve ever bulk-edited 200 work items and spent the rest of the day triple-checking you didn’t break someone’s workflow, you’ll know what I mean.

That’s where tools like Excel-like Bulk Issue Editor for Jira can make life easier.

Instead of working item by item, you get a full, table-style view of your work items right inside Jira. You can filter by field, sort by status, and view everything in one place. Need to fix dozens of assignees or update old statuses? You can do that directly in the table, just like working in a spreadsheet.

It’s especially helpful when you're trying to manage your Jira backlog efficiently without spending hours clicking through menus.

But remember this: the app is not about replacing Jira entirely.

It’s about giving admins and project managers a cleaner, faster way to do the work they’re already doing. No constant tab switching. Just a clear workspace where you can manage work item management without a hassle.