If you are using Scrum or Kanplan, then a big part of your routine will be to groom your backlog. This means making sure that high priority items are floated to the top and not getting buried. This is a constant exercise and is especially important as you and your team approach the start of a new sprint, in the case of Scrum. With Kanplan, it is just as important to prioritize the tasks so that your team can maintain their throughput and not violate any constraints because of poor planning. 

Jira's backlog comes with several handy features to help you avoid turning backlog grooming into a tedious exercise. To prioritize issues in your backlog, you simply move the high priority issues up and move the low priority issues down. While this seems very simple, as your backlog grows, it can become tricky to drag an issue all the way from the bottom of a backlog with over hundreds of issues to the top, and let's not forget that newly added issues go to the bottom by default. What you can do in this case is right-click the issue you want to move and select the Top of Backlog option from the Send to menu. This will move the issue to the top of the backlog. You can do this with multiple issues as well by simply hold down the Shift or Ctrl key on your keyboard to select all the issues you want to move and either use the Send to menu or drag and drop, as shown in the following screenshot:

Another useful tool is the ability to flag issues that are important or require special attention, which is done by right-clicking an issue and selecting the Add flag option. Once an issue has been flagged, a flag icon will appear next to the issue, and will always be highlighted. Note that this is mostly for visual purposes only; Jira will not force you to immediately work on a flagged issue in any way.

Lastly, you can display additional information about the issues in the backlog. These can be data from the out-of-box fields, or any custom fields you create. A common use case for this is to display the labels that have been added to issues, as a label is an easy way for users to add a tag to an issue for various purposes. To add more field values to the issue card in the backlog, follow these steps:

1. Browse to your project's agile board.
2. Click on the Board menu and select the Configure option.
3. Select the Card layout option from the left navigation panel.
4. Select the field you want to add from under the Backlog section. You can add up to three fields.

As we can see in the preceding screenshot, we have added both the created date and labels to the issue card in the backlog.