A walk through a normal day, ticket to merged PR, and where most of the time actually goes.
If you ask a PM how a ticket goes from "To Do" to "Done" they'll probably describe something clean. If you ask an actual engineer, it looks more like this.
Check Jira board, pick up the ticket assigned to you (or grab one if it's your turn). Read the description, maybe it's missing details so you ping someone on Slack. Then it's git checkout main, git pull, and creating a branch — usually named after whatever convention the team has, assuming everyone remembers it.
This is the part Jira and git mostly stay out of your way for. You're just coding, committing as you go. Good engineers commit small and often, referencing the ticket ID in the message so later on someone (maybe future you) can trace a change back to why it was made.
Push, open a PR, and here's where it usually gets messy — you have to go back to Jira, find the ticket again (searching, because you've since closed that tab), and move it manually to In Review or Done. Multiply this by 5-10 tickets a week and it's a real chunk of context switching.
None of this is a skill issue, it's just a lot of small manual steps that don't need a human doing them. That's the whole reason I built a CLI (Jitly) that does the connecting-git-to-Jira part automatically.