Building my own Task Management System with the Free Jira

Jira is used to help NGOs stay focused as well as helping Space X launch manned rockets into space. It is a tool that many many companies utilise as their issue / task tracker and its probably one of the main unifies within our sectors. Over a year ago, Atlassian created a free tier to their cloud offering and this has been something that has been very tempting.

Rewind a few years ago and I was experimenting with my own Atlassian Cloud set-up for my own personal use and was dropping quite a bit of money each month for that luxury. After a while the price justification was something I was not able to sustain and so I abandoned my own Atlassian Cloud stack and moved back to Todoist.

Fast Forwarded to today and I am utilising my own Atlassian stack for personal task management, tracking my house projects and serving as a reference library for information which I keep privately and publicly (https://medium.com/@hillmiester/creating-personal-professional-recipes-5eb31fc53129). But what I want to focus on today is how I built my own Task Management approach within Jira for free and with utilising a free plug-in to gain an extra perspective.

Building a System

Note - Atlassian has built what they call “next-gen” projects which makes management of statuses, issue types etc as easy as pie! This was a starting base for me but I had to abandon my use of a next-gen project purely due to two factors

- Free Plug-in / I utilise a plug-in for gaining a new perspective which is only available for the classic projects at the moment, but they want to make it work with next-gen, so I may jump back later

I decided on a classic approach to how I want to set-up my project, this is as follows:

• Backlog – Gathering all thoughts and ideas
• Selected – Tasks I want to tackle this week
• On Hold – Tasks which I am blocked on (Awaiting Feedback)
• In-Progress – Tasks I am actively working on
• Done – Completed Tasks

It may seem a bit extreme as I could certainly have just “To-Do”, “In Progress” and “Done” but for my purposes I wanted to gain insights in which areas are slowly me down and to separate my concerns on the topics. I am always reviewing and streamlining my approach but right now that is how I have the columns on my board and the statuses established.

So, I just throw everything in the backlog and leave it like that? Not at all, I utilise EPIC tickets as “buckets” which will not theoretically get closed (OMFG! I hear some say but its a flow that works for me) these buckets are classified as:

• Inbox – This is where I throw unassociated topics and tasks
• Epic for each Content Platform I used – Medium, SoundCloud etc to separate my “content pipeline”
• Shop – Items I want / need to buy but not a shopping list for groceries but actual bigger items
• Habits – Used to poke me and track my habits
• Consulting – I have a could of Epics for each of the start-ups I am helping to consult at the moment

Gaining a New Perspective

I utilise Releases to define calendar weeks and then I use a free and totally awesome Story Mapping add-on for JIRA which enables me to gain a birds eye view of all the active topics.

This perspective I utilise on a daily basis to review and adapt my weekly plan for tasks and topics I want to tackle.

Story Mapping Boards

free

Atlassian Marketplace

In general I utilise the Kanban Board for the project as the “here and now” and I use the Story Mapping Board as a planning instrument.

Have the system work for you (automation)

Atlassian has a really cool and somewhat hidden feature in Jira and it’s called “Automation” with which you can create a lot of actions which make your life easier.

One such automation I have is that if I throw a task in the backlog and don’t assign it to one of my buckets (epics) then Jira will go and assign it to my Inbox epic automagically.

Another such automation I have moves any items in the Backlog to Selected and raises the priority to the highest for all tickets which have a due date of today. As my board is configured to have a swim lane at the top for all tickets which have the highest priority, it catches my attention immediately.

Another piece of automation I use is outside of the Atlassian eco-system but connects very well with it, its called Zapier (https://zapier.com/) you can think of this as an advanced version of IFTT (https://ifttt.com/). The premise is that it enables you to connect one services / products APIs to another, enabling you to make very good bridges and have a very streamlined process and experience.

At the moment I used Zapier for the following:

• Any new books added to my GoodReads “To Read” list will create a ticket in Jira detailing in the summary how many pages the book has and assigning it to my library component
• Any new videos added to my YouTube playlist called “consumption” will create a ticket in Jira detailing in the summary how long the video is and assigning it to my library component

Much Improved Mobile App

Atlassian is coming on leaps and bounds with their mobile application for JIRA. Even though you cannot access add-ons with the app the experience on offer is very polished and usable. As I use my board as my weekly planner so to speak, I can pull this up on my phone or iPad at anytime to get a picture whats on my plate and make adjustments when needed.

Jira Mobile App

free

Google — iOS

The Final Invoice

Actually how much does it cost to run a set-up like this? Let’s take a look at the numbers:

• Jira Software Cloud — Free
• Story Mapping Boards — Free

The system will remain free up to 10 users, so this approach can scale to a small family / friends. Considering my previous solution was around $36 a year for Todoist Premium.

The question really is, what is holding you back?

The Future Plans

One of the areas I am still utilising Todoist is for what I call the “homeslate” this is essential an iPad I have on the wall that is the hub of my smart home and general house activities. At the moment I have it always on with split screen between Todoist (Chores) and Tado (House Heating System) and I would like to have Jira power the tasking for Todoist. This is a small project I am working on to update the system to have it more maintainable and for me then to be able to downgrade my personal Todoist to the free one.

As well as this, I want to utilise some of the analytics I can gather such as cycle time for all the various tasks. How long does it usually take for me to read a book on average for example.