What Should We Work on First? Bringing Live Prioritization to Jira

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Most teams don't have a shortage of work. The harder part is figuring out what deserves our collective attention first.

That can get difficult in Jira. Work gets spread across projects and boards, priorities compete with due dates, and something that looks important in one backlog may be competing with five higher-impact items another team member is managing.

I ran into this a few months ago when my team took on some additional responsibilities. We knew everyone was busy, but we didn’t have a great sense of everything we had committed to as a team—or how much work it actually represented.

So we used JXL to pull all of our team’s Jira work into a single sheet.

If you haven't used it before, JXL gives you a familiar, spreadsheet-style view of your Jira issues, letting you edit, organize, and analyze work across multiple projects in one place.

Once we had everything together, we totaled the story points across the team and we were well beyond our recommended sprint capacity.

We were able to see everything our team was working on in one JXL sheet. But then came the next question: "What should we work on first?"

Enter JFL

One of JXL's newer features are formulas.

Formulas can be written either in JFL, a language that’s very similar to the spreadsheet formula languages we all know from other applications, or the even more powerful JFL Script, which is essentially the world’s most used programming language, JavaScript.

Like in Excel or Google Sheets formulas, JFL lets you use functions like IF(), SUM(), AND(), and many others—all using Jira data. The calculations live alongside your work items and update automatically whenever work changes.

That opened up some interesting possibilities

Building a shared prioritization signal

We decided to start simple and use a formula to flag work that might need a closer look.

For example, since we were already using story points to understand how much work was on our plate, we could flag any high-effort item approaching its due date as “Needs attention”:

IF(AND(this.storyPoints >= 3, DATEDIF(NOW(), this.dueDate, "D") <= 3), "Needs attention", "On Track")

It's a straightforward example, but that's the point. You don't need to overcomplicate things. You can take data that's already in Jira and use JFL to apply team-specific logic to surface the work that matters most.

And story points are just one input. You could use JFL to calculate team capacity, flag delivery risks, measure cross-project progress, compare estimates against actuals, or create custom metrics specific to how your team works.

For us, that's where JFL became really useful. Jira already tracks the work; our formulas let us use that data to answer questions Jira fields alone can't.

Next week, we’ll go a step further and show how to combine multiple Jira fields into a live prioritization score, then use conditional formatting to make the results easier to act on.