My advice after working with Jira for the last several years: keep it light. Process heavy Jira is/can be a nightmare. Jira as "digital stickies" works well, and still provides plenty of metrics for outside stakeholders.

Based on my experience:

- Use the "Jira Agile" (formerly greenhopper) add-on so that you have sprint/kanban boards and reports to visualize planned and in-flight work. Enable the "Backlog View" for your boards to separate planned from in-progress work.

- Keep required fields to an absolute minimum (we only require Summary) so that you can quickly capture cards and flesh them out later.

- Avoid complex workflows - use the Software Simplified workflow if possible. Don't complicate it further without a really strong business case.

- Learn the keyboard shortcuts. C (create), E (edit), I (assign to self) "[" (hide sidebar) and "." (command palette) are your friends

- Confluence and Slack both have great integrations to let you publish and interact with your Jira issues

Those are just a few random thoughts on how we've kept Jira working for us and not against us.