[basil]

I used to be in that situation which is why I wrote Bee (http://neat.io/bee/). Its a Mac client for JIRA (amongst other services) and makes JIRA much more pleasant to use.

JIRA's UI tends to be geared towards project management types. I wanted to bring the focus back onto the engineer.

[kbd]

Happy to know about Bee. Trying it right now.

However, Jira fundamentally is about managers tracking work, and not about workers actually getting stuff done. There's no way I can track all my tasks in Jira even if I have a nicer GUI for it.

I'm actually part of the way towards writing a program to sync tasks between Asana and Jira using their APIs. I'm hoping that that'll let me continue working in Asana while it handles Jira (which I've always found incomprehensible) for me.

[basil]

Well you'd be surprised. I've also tried to solve this problem.

You can create your own lists inside of Bee which filter issues based on your own rules (http://neat.io/bee/docs/smart-lists.html). It's helpful because you just define the rules one-time and then flick to it whenever you need to.

Bee also has a menubar helper which tracks your short-term tasks and queues up your next issue so you always know what you're working on (http://neat.io/bee/docs/the-short-list.html).

Also you can add your own Notes list which is just a series of text files (easily synced via Dropbox) if you want to track your own local tasks.

I'm constantly iterating based on user feedback so if you have time, please let me know how it works out for you :)

[jakobe]

Just bought Bee (to track github issues). That's a pretty convincing video you have there!