Jira Board for Everyday Life

Do you use a task manager in your everyday life?

I’ve been using a task manager since school. It started with a simple to-do list in my notebook. Later, when smartphones became common, I created my first digital to-do list on my phone.

Today, there are many tools to manage your tasks:

1. Notion
2. Obsidian
3. ClickUp

…and many others.

I used Notion for a long time. It’s a really good tool, but I found it difficult to manage routine weekly tasks. At the beginning of every week, I had to manually recreate my routine tasks. Later, I created a template, but I still had to manually manage tasks that were not part of my weekly routine.

One day, I talked with my project manager at work, and she shared an interesting idea: why not implement Jira in real life? I thought about it for a couple of weeks and discussed it with my friends. It was amazing to realize that I’m not alone. Many IT professionals think about using Jira in everyday life because it’s clear, standardized, and a familiar tool.

A couple of months ago, I started implementing my life in Jira. I created Epics. In my system, Epics represent yearly goals, for example: read 12 books per year, launch one of my projects, save X amount of money, and so on. Epics combine monthly, weekly, and daily tasks under them.

I also created labels to separate different areas of my life: family and friends, career, health and self-care, learning, sport and challenge.

But what excited me the most was the automation part. Finally, I was able to set up my daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly habits as routine tasks. I was really happy about that because now I don’t have to think about recreating them anymore. However, it’s worth noting that the free plan has a limit of 100 automation runs per month.

I also customized my board statuses: Current Week, Daily Results (usually tasks where I can see the result at the end of the day), Today, In Progress, and Done.

Another great feature is that I can share tasks with others (for example, my family members) and try to be more productive together.

Jira has five priority levels, which felt like too many for me at first, so I started with three. Later, I expanded them to four levels.

Overall, Jira is a great tool if you love systems and metrics. However, it can feel a bit heavy for everyday life planning. I believe it works best for engineers or people with a structured, analytical mindset.

But I’m really curious about your experience:

• Do you prefer simple to-do lists or more structured systems with metrics?
• Have you ever tried using tools like Jira for personal planning?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and approaches. Maybe there are even better systems out there that I haven’t tried yet.