I see people where I work not do this, and it drives me crazy. Our director of engineering will literally add tickets for himself to do things that would take less time to just do. At least I hear "I took a page from your book and messaged the person instead of adding a ticket for myself to message them" often, which is a good sign.
I've done this. It irks me too, but sometimes I'm in organizational mode, and sometimes I'm in execution mode. :)
Also, I work in an environment[0] where all work is required to go through the formal tracker documentation flow (and all code changes must be approved by a second party).
So the ticket step is non-optional, and in fact required before work can begin -- we name branches with the ticket ID, so that Pivotal[1] can track the GitHub lifecycle.
[0] PCI-DSS, SOC 2, etc
[1] RIP :(