Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Distractions suck - having a system to manage them is good. Pushing people to use it is necessary.

I hate jira, but I agree with your point. I always have notes that i can reference.

More to reference = less time to get back up to speed

The only thing worse than keeping JIRA constantly up to date is keeping interrupting managers up to date when I already keep JIRA constantly up to date with the thing they're asking about. It gets amusing when I'm deep down enough into the technical weeds that I've forgotten the exact high level task I'm working on (the thing the manager actually cares about), and refer to JIRA myself to answer the question of what I'm working on.

Could be worse - you could be using Rally.

Or a giant board of post-it notes.