How are you managing your day-to-day tasks? In Jira?

Hi @Aimee Roddick _Walter_

This is a very common situation, and you’re definitely not alone.
In short: Jira can be used for daily follow-ups, but if it’s not set up properly, it can quickly become complex and difficult to use.

How can you manage this in Jira?

If you want to stay fully inside Jira, a few approaches that work reasonably well are:

📌Personal issues / task issue type

Create a lightweight issue type (e.g. “Personal Task” or “Follow-up”) that’s excluded from boards and reports. This avoids polluting team backlogs.

📌 Automation for reminders

Jira Automation can help with chasing and nudging:

• Trigger on status change or due date
• Send yourself an email or Slack reminder
• Schedule follow-ups (e.g. 24h / 48h later)
• Filters & dashboards for “my small stuff”

Dedicated JQL filters like assignee = currentUser() combined with a simple dashboard can help, but it still requires discipline.
That said, many programme managers I’ve worked with hit the same wall you described:
Jira is great for structured work, but it’s simply too much overhead for micro-tasks like meeting notes, email chases, or “remind myself later” items.

If you’re open to using third-party apps, I can suggest a cleaner alternative: Use Jira for projects and add a separate layer for personal tasks. If you’re looking to avoid creating “official” Jira tickets for everything, this is where a hybrid approach works really well.

🌱 One option is Getting Work Done, which is designed specifically to bridge that gap:

• 🔒 Private tasks

Create lightweight tasks that live inside Jira but are visible only to you.
They’re not Jira issues, so they don’t affect boards, backlogs, or reports.

• 🧠 Single place to work

Your personal follow-ups sit right next to your assigned Jira issues — no context switching to external tools.

• 🌱 Personal workflow support
• 📥 Inbox for quick capture
• 🗓️ Agenda for flexible planning
• 🎯 Priority matrix
• 🍅 Pomodoro for focus

This works especially well for programme managers who want structure without process overhead.
Time-based nudges (the “don’t let me forget” problem)
For cases where timing matters — for example:

• “Remind me 4 hours before the due date”
• “Ping me tomorrow if I haven’t followed up”

a dedicated reminder layer helps a lot.

🌱 With a Reminder app, you can:

• Set reminders relative to dates or events
• Send reminders to yourself or others
• Avoid relying on memory or calendar clutter

Bottom line:

• Jira = excellent for shared, structured work
• Lightweight personal tasks + reminders = best way to stop things falling through the cracks

That combination tends to work far better than forcing everything into Jira issues.

Hope this helps!

🍀 To learn more, feel free to contact me or explore the application through the Atlassian Marketplace link I’ve provided. 🍀

Disclaimer: I work for the vendor of Getting Work Done and the Reminder app.

Hi @Aimee Roddick _Walter_ 

In my experience, Jira can work for day-to-day task management, but only if it’s used intentionally and supported by the right views.

Jira is excellent at handling complex delivery workflows, but where it often falls down is visibility and usability for small, cross-cutting tasks. Those tasks usually are in Jira… they’re just hard to see, easy to forget, and scattered across projects.

For granular resource and task management, you can try Planyway for Jira.

It sits on top of Jira and gives you:

• A timeline view of all Jira issues (across projects and teams)

• Clear visibility into who is working on what and when

• The ability to plan and rebalance workload visually

Hi @Aimee Roddick _Walter_ ,

When you say Jira feels “complex” and has “too much overhead,” do you mean specifically for tracking work from a programme/project manager perspective, or also for breaking down tasks at the individual developer level?

In our case, we usually don’t break down and track every minute of an 8‑hour workday in Jira. We intentionally keep about 30–35% of the time as a buffer that isn’t logged as Jira tasks. That buffer covers daily meetings and other small, ad‑hoc activities.

The key point is how detailed you and your team want to be in tracking this kind of work. If you are using sprint-based development, the burndown chart usually provides good visibility into your team’s progress, but not every single activity needs to be captured in Jira. You might consider only creating Jira issues for items that are essential to delivery (e.g. user stories, bugs, larger tasks), and leave very small, low‑risk personal reminders outside Jira in a lighter-weight tool.

Hello @Aimee Roddick _Walter_, welcome to the community!

We keep day-to-day task management in Jira as simple as possible. For many projects, a basic Kanban board is all we need – no extra complexity. When we need more structure, like seeing dependencies or overall timelines, we add Timeline or Roadmap views. Sometimes a quick spreadsheet helps us plan batches of tasks before syncing decisions back to Jira.

We stay inside the Atlassian ecosystem whenever we can, using native features first. If something is missing, we look for solutions on the Atlassian Marketplace rather than external tools.

Integrations only come in when the team already uses another app heavily. Otherwise, native Jira keeps things streamlined and reduces context switching.

Hello @Aimee Roddick _Walter_ 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Can you provide more information on what about Jira you consider to be too much overhead?

What o you see as the key features of day to day task management?

In your environment are you administrators allowing you to use Team Managed projects?