🎄 Advent Calendar Day 20: “Work Item: Summary Only” — The Art of Saying Nothing in Jira

[#1]

“Thank you for creating tasks without descriptions.
Thanks to you, everyone remembers that work is pain.”

Somewhere on your Jira board, there’s a ticket called something like:

• “Fix bug”
• “Update flow”
• “Improve performance”

No description. No context. No steps. No expected result. Just a title and pure optimism.

On paper, it’s “created.” In reality, it’s a tiny landmine waiting for the next unlucky person who opens it.

 

“I’ll fill it in later” – famous last words

Most empty tickets don’t come from laziness.
They come from that little lie we tell ourselves:

• “I’ll add details after the meeting.”
• “It’s obvious, everyone knows what this is.”
• “I just need to capture it quickly so I don’t forget.”

And then Slack explodes, someone calls, a new fire appears, and “later” becomes “never.” The task stays. The context doesn’t.

Now it’s not a ticket.
It’s a riddle with a status.

The hidden tax of “no description”

An empty Jira task doesn’t just mean “we’ll figure it out later.”
It means someone else will pay the price for the five minutes you didn’t spend writing.

They’ll pay with:

• Extra messages:
  “Hey, do you remember what TSK-482 is?”
• Awkward guesses:
  “I think this is about the checkout page?”
• Wrong work:
  “We fixed the wrong thing, but at least something’s fixed.”
  
  

And then we all get to enjoy the classic combo: rework, frustration, and that quiet feeling of “why is everything harder than it should be?”

All because the description box stayed empty.

“But everyone knows what this is about”

Do they?

Because:

• People go on vacation.
• People change teams.
• People leave.
• Projects are paused and resurrected six months later.
  
  

That “tiny obvious bug” from last week can turn into “no one has any idea what this was” surprisingly fast.

Also, “everyone knows” usually means “two people remember, and one of them is off today.”

If a task needs a meeting, a Slack thread and a call to be explained again, it wasn’t obvious. It was undocumented.

Good descriptions aren’t bureaucracy. They’re kindness.

Writing a description doesn’t have to be a novel.
Most of the time, 5–10 lines are enough.

Something like:

• Where did you see the issue / need?
• What is actually wrong / missing / to be done?
• Why does it matter? (Impact, user, system, team)
• How do we know it’s “Done”? (Expected result or acceptance criteria)
• Extras: screenshots, links, example data, Jira links.

That’s it. Not perfect, but infinitely better than: “Fix bug.”

You’re not writing for Jira. You’re writing for the poor human who will open this at 9:13 on a random Tuesday and try to make sense of it.

Empty tickets = unclear thinking

There’s another uncomfortable angle:
Very often, if you can’t write a description, it’s because you don’t really know what you want yet.

• “Improve UX.” Improve what exactly?
• “Optimize performance.” Where? For whom? By how much?
• “Refactor code.” Why? What’s wrong with it now?

Forcing yourself to type a few sentences is also forcing yourself to think. Sometimes, halfway through writing, you realize:

• “Oh, this is actually two tasks.”
• “We need input from design before we create this.”
• “This isn’t worth doing at all.”
  
  

That’s a win. Better to discover that in the description box than during sprint planning or, worse, during implementation.

Tiny habits that make everyone’s life less painful

You don’t need a new process, a workshop, or a manifesto. You just need a few small rules like:

• No naked tickets.
  If there’s no description, it doesn’t go into the sprint. Simple.
• “If I disappeared today” check.
  Before moving a ticket forward, ask:
  “If I vanished, could someone still work on this based on what’s written?”
• One screenshot is worth 20 messages.
  Attach the thing you’re talking about. Future you will actually remember what that weird button looked like.
• Teach juniors by example.
  If seniors write good descriptions, others slowly copy them. If seniors create cryptic tickets, well… welcome to the cult.
  
  

None of this is glamorous. But it’s the difference between “our work is chaotic and exhausting” and “our tools mostly help, instead of fight us.”

✨ See You in the Next Ticket (With Words This Time)

Empty Jira tasks are tiny acts of optimism:
“I’ll totally remember what this means later.”

Reality usually answers:
“No. No, you won’t.”

Next time you hit Create, try giving Future You (or your teammate) just a little more to work with. A sentence. A screenshot. A clear “Definition of Done.”

It won’t make work painless. But it will stop reminding everyone that work is unnecessarily painful.

See you in the next Advent window — hopefully with fewer mystery tickets and more “Oh wow, this is actually clear.” ✍️