Honestly, seeing this, I'm 1/2 tempted to revisit org-mode and retrying emacs as a dev environment.
Don't get me wrong; I use emacs all the time, I just can't seem to make it work for me when working with teams of people on large-ish software projects.
But maybe org mode is worth a revisit as a "managing my ADHD" tool; it's got to be better than Jira, haha.
Emacs yak shaving can lead to high dopaminergic stimulation, while it may help you mange TODO items, it's also a great way to do something fun that's tangentially related to your actual work.
For a big payoff you can combine Emacs, GPTel, mcp.el, and the Jira/Confluence MCP server[0] so LLMs can manage your tickets for you.
> I just can't seem to make it work for me
Maybe you just don't have sufficient exposure to Elisp. Emacs Lisp is one of the best blackmagicfockery automation tools, you can do tons of interesting things. Just the other day I got sucked into a big, long-going Jira Epic, I just needed to find every single PR in my work GitHub Orgs related to specific Jira tickets. Then I wrote this - https://github.com/agzam/github-topics
Once you learn some Org-mode, you will see how awesome it is to be able to turn just about any kind of data into an outline format - I read HN and Reddit in Org-mode format, keep my notes, my Anki cards, my code experiments, my LLM musings - all in Org-mode.