My personal top priority is no Jira or other project management software, no standups, no sprints. Not because these are annoyances in the sense of feeling lik

My personal top priority is no Jira or other project management software, no standups, no sprints. Not because these are annoyances in the sense of feeling like I have an Office Space job. It's because I have a certain psychology of how I work where I thrive and overperform when I feel I have space. I lose engagement and shut down when I feel micro-observed, -managed, -scheduled. I admittedly have a much more sensitive threshold than most people for feeling discomfort from these, and need more space to thrive. But it's who I am. I can't help that it makes a world of difference to my performance and engagement. I've tried to adjust, it doesn't work. I love my job when it involves the process of fluidly deciding what to do on a given day, balancing fires, deadlines, maintenance, new functionality, ideas I woke up with, etc. And also I'll choose how to communicate rather than fill out rote status reports or go to rote meetings. I enjoy communicating when it's at its natural cadence and level rather than driven by process. I shut down when I have to represent tasks or resolve them with project management metadata and process. It's not that slowing down annoys me, it takes away a kind of agency that's necessary for me to have. When I don't have it, my job is a stressful thing that I only do for the paycheck. I can't over perform in that headspace and then it starts a spiral where doing average work makes me feel bad about my career and myself. I also don't understand how people feel true ownership of systems when their work is carved up in tickets and sprint boundaries. I see so many things falling through the cracks because people do the minimum that Jira tells them to do. Or some common sense important change doesn't get made because it's no one's job to do what needs to be done to keep something working well, only to respond to tickets. Maybe not everyone can be expected to perform well with full trust of ownership, maybe most can't, but others can only perform well that way. The most important development of my career has been learning my own personal psychology of work. It's a tragedy that we expect everyone to work and communicate in the same set of processes rather than optimize based on the diversity of individual psychology. And I get that this is high maintenance and not scalable for a huge org. But these days even small companies have the cargo cult behavior of adopting the process they see at large companies.