Not OP, but I also have a personal kanban at work to get stuff out of my head. The team has a JIRA, but my personal kanban is explicitly separate and private, so that I don't have to redact what goes on there. Every little idea for a code refactoring or a library update can go in there without making a huge mess for others. The JIRA tickets assigned to me also go in there, and I use checklists to break down tickets into individual steps. (The kanban is in a private GitHub repo, so the checklists are those found in GitHub-flavored Markdown.)
If I ever find myself utterly stuck or blocked on the current task, I can pull up some small quick-win task from the backlog in my kanban to get my mind unstuck. Plus I'm always able to say that I accomplished at least something by the end of the day, even if 80% was spent hunting some elusive bug without producing anything to show for it.