I am curious as to why, as a developer, are you using Trello and Jira? It sounds so far from the code and there's too much friction?

Have you tried using GitHub or GitLab for code related work?

You can have the following to accelerate work:

- Issue templates to reduce the friction to write well specified issues. Templates for bugs, features, and incidents will go a long way. You can create issues simply by sending an email to a specific address. You can save the issue templates as email templates, and create issues by sending an email. This reduces friction so you don't have to open a browser, sign in to the repo management application, go to the repository, click on a button to create the issue, click on the drop-down to choose the template, and then edit the template, then hit save.

- Tags: you can have Todo, Doing, Done tags for a start. Others may include Improvement, Docs, etc. You take one and only one issue from the Todo, change it to Doing. Create a merge request. Checkout the newly created branch. Commit, push, and merge it. The issue is closed automatically.

- Use milestones: you can pick a handful of issues you want to tackle for a given week, and tackle only those, one by one.

- Get users for your applications and a dedicated Slack workspace. It's one thing to develop in a void, it's another when you have users who can reach you on Slack complaining about functionality and depending on your software to work. It can really focus your effort, and light a fire up your seat, as you wouldn't spend time on vain features, but only on what matters: the bugs that are most frequent with the highest impact on work getting done, and functionality that makes life easier. Users will quickly tell you what matters. Not even talking about the feeling of serving real users. Even one.

- Add monitoring and analytics so you can see how people are using the software, and capture errors and exceptions.

- Add logging for successful actions and failed actions. Are the users failing to accomplish a task. Can you make it easier?

- Write the product description before writing the product: what would be cool to exist in the world that doesn't? What would it do, etc. And then decompose those issues. But having an overarching story for the thing you're building makes it tighter and helps you focus.

For a low footprint solution, you can use TaskWarrior[0]. It has a CLI, writes to JSON files. My .task is a repository and I have a script to push everything, so I can go to another laptop and simply pull my tasks. In other words, my tasks are version controlled. An entry in an rc file:

function tupd() {
git -C ~/.task commit -a -m "Update tasks $(whoami)@$(hostname)"
git -C ~/.task push
}

>I completed a task! Show me a nice animation while you chuck the task in a completed bin or something.

I think you would have a bigger dopamine rush by having working software than having a nice animation. As a system, you would start optimizing for that animation, and probably make up bogus tasks that are easily completed just to feel productive.

TaskWarrior tells you "There are more urgent tasks" if there are tasks with a score higher than the one you just completed. I like that attitude.

Cognitive load can be amplified when using the wrong tools for the task, and I find that Trello/Jira are in a universe that is simply far from code.

[0]: https://taskwarrior.org/