How Jira Software 10x My Writing Rate. Don’t Be Fooled by Its Name.

It’s more than just a bug/issue tracking system for the IT literate.

McDonald’s epitomizes the concept of fast food. They do take fast serving seriously, considering they spent millions in recent years to reduce a mere 20 seconds off serving time in their drive-thru. It wouldn’t be an overstatement for me to say McDonald’s is the best and fastest serving fast-food chain in my country.

If you step into a McDonald’s outlet and place an order, you may have noticed that behind the counter, the kitchen hands look up to a black screen with rectangles while preparing orders. If you look closer, you would have noticed that each rectangle, or commonly known as a card, represents a customer’s order.

Essentially, needing only a glance, kitchen hands would be able to know which order comes first (first come first serve), what exact items are needed to be fulfilled for each order (they could prepare the same food across multiple cards at one go as well), and which order is fulfilled and can be delivered to the customers. This is how the fast-food business has been revolutionized. Speed and efficiency have been increased multifold.

Your writing can too. So does your life, in a similar way. But for now, let’s focus on writing.

Introducing Kanban

The order fulfillment system closely mimics the concept of Kanban. The Kanban system was first popularized by Toyota in their car manufacturing factory. It’s no wonder Toyota is one of the most efficient car manufacturers in the world since World War II. Kanban comes from two Japanese words, 看 (kan) which means see, and 板 (ban) which translates to board.

There is a lot of great ideals beneath this concept but for the purpose of this article, the summarized ideals would be:

1. Ease to visualize the flow of work
2. Progress Tracking
3. Prioritization
4. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)

The system has been such a revelation. It is hugely popular these days and adopted by countless industries: IT, manufacturing, F&B, to name a few. It has limitless potential and boundaries. If you can imagine it, you probably could use Kanban in any aspect of your life.

We have no limits to our world. We’re only limited by our imagination.

— Bob Ross

One of the most unique use cases of Kanban that I know of is a multinational company that provides its own baristas and coffees to its employees. A productive issue crops up with the introduction of this perk. During break time, long lines of queues are seen at the coffee stall. An employee could spend close to 30 minutes getting a cup of handcrafted coffee.

Enter Kanban. A system is introduced where an employer can make an order from the comfort of his/her workstation. The barista received the order, and update the status accordingly. Once the coffee is ready, a notification will prompt the employee and the coffee can be picked up, thus solving the productivity issue altogether.

Using Jira Software to 10x my writing

Since using Kanban, I have been able to improve my writing and throughput. I’m using a Cloud-based, free edition of Jira Software, which allows me to spin up Kanban Boards at ease. You may also use other products like Notion and monday.com, which have free versions as well. If you are not into the digital world, you can opt for a physical board and sticky notes too!

Here’s how it has helped in my Medium writing.

Catching all the fleeting ideas in one place

Writing is as creative as any activity could be. Our right brain, which is responsible for all creative juices in our brain works in a wondrous way. Ideas come and go when you least expect them. I have lost count of how many ideas of a story have been hatched during a shower or dishwashing session. Alas, the ideas go as fleeting as they come. I have lost even further count of how many times ideas were lost in my mind. Some could be recovered in a matter of hours, some days, some lost forever.

Having a Kanban Board allows me to store all the ideas in one single place. No matter how fleeting the idea is, I try to capture them on the board as soon as possible, sometimes stopping myself from what I’m doing and spend a few seconds logging it into the system. Jira comes with a mobile app, which makes it much more convenient to do so.

I no longer lose the ideas that float through my mind.

Grooming stories

Not all ideas blossom into full-fledged stories and get published. But having them all in one place helps me in grooming them into one.

In its lifetime, a story (appears as a card) could go through a myriad of stages. It could sit there for weeks without getting worked on. Several cards could be combined into one story as they touch on related topics in a nutshell.

As time passes by and an idea blossomed, a card can be groomed with a skeletal framework of relevant points, all of which makes things easier when you eventually start writing the story. It takes me 3 -4 hours to write a complete story in one sitting, a big contrast with when I just started. It used to take me several days to complete a story.

Keep my life revolving about writing, all the time

By far the most unexpected outcome of this practice is that it opened my eyes and ears to stories in my daily life, and life, as they often say it, would never be the same for me, ever again.

Frequent readers would know that I’m an avid believer in a positive mentality, about viewing the world in a positive way, behaving, and reacting positively regardless of the situation. This has taken that context to another notch.

Having this set up in place has trained my mind to constantly lookout for a story, and typically a positive learning experience, as always I focus on positivity in life. In any activity I do on a daily basis, be it watching Youtube or Netflix, dealing with the kids, interacting with others remotely via work or personal life, I’ve been able to pick up life lessons, regardless of how small and insignificant they seem to be.

An acquaintance could say a sentence, or I have read a quote online, or a movie character said something funny. These pricked my ears and my brain would be able to transform that one sentence into a story title, with a few relevant points coming along, and end up being a life lesson, to be learned by myself, to be shared with others through Medium.

It’s not just about writing a story, it's as much about learning from the seemingly mundane things in life, and I’m loving it.

A constant stream of stories to work on

I no longer work on stories, one at a time. Like a seasoned blacksmith, while working on one, I have several irons in the fire, ready to be worked on at any given time. I have a constant stream of ideas to select from and build upon at any given time.

I don’t struggle to think about what to write, when I’m about to write a new story. I could choose any story in the list when I want to write.

This has greatly contributed to the increased rate I’m able to publish my stories. It cuts short the downtime, constantly associated with writers, when they are out of ideas.

As always, give it a try. Life is full of exploration. You have nothing to lose.