Managing tasks across projects

[Jon Gettinger]

two questions around tasks:

Is there a way to aggregate all of my tasks into a single list that I can work from rather than having to visit each project? 

Likewise is there a way to view all tasks for a specific team member?

There is a lot to like about Jira but having tasks always living inside projects is not ideal.  They need to be first class citizens! There are situations where a project is way too much overhead. What to do?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

This isn't really a pure Jira problem - every issue tracking system has similar issues with cross-area lists of issues.

In almost all of them, there's a simple answer, with a variety of less-simple ways to do it.

The simple answer is "identify what they have in common and use the search and reporting functions to get that all in one place".

In Jira, that turns into "search for the issues" - if you do that, and save your search as a filter, you can go back to it any time for the current list, and use the filter in gadgets on dashboards, software boards and reports.

The harder part of the answer is finding the common thing.  There's usually a lot of ways to do this, but the ones I run into a lot in Jira are things like:

• Assignee = currentUser() 
• Watcher = currentUser()
• Participants = currentUser()
• Labels in ( nic-likes-this, penguins, cats) 

These are usually combined with "and resolution is empty" so that they only return open issues, but I think you can see where we're going with this!

Obviously, if you have a specific person to nominate, swap "currentUser()" for their id.

I am not sure how to talk about your last paragraph - Issues are "first class citizens" in Jira - it's the one thing it simply won't work without.  Whilst projects are containers for issues, they are functional, not the primary actor.  They hold data that tells issues how to behave, they group them together, but they're not above issues - Jira works fine if you simplify it to having one single project with all the issues in it.  I'm not sure what "overhead" you're seeing in a project.

[Jon Gettinger]

Thanks Nic for your answer.  Very helpful. 

My remark about issues and first class citizens referred to the fact they can't live outside of projects, which you confirmed.  We are looking at replacing Asana with Jira. In Asana tasks are foundational and they can live inside or outside of projects. This can be useful for managing certain types of work.   Anyway thank you for taking the time to respond.