In complex environments, individuals need to be able to selectively focus on relevant information and to maintain it for later use. Attention and working memory (WM) represent two core cognitive abilities that are involved in cognitive control. Higher cognitive abilities have mostly been demonstrated in primates, yet corvid songbirds show remarkably similar skills. Therefore, we used jackdaws to study these instances of cognitive control. Two jackdaws were trained on a delayed estimation paradigm, tailored to probe attention and WM processes. One of two simultaneously presented sample colors had to be selected from a continuous color wheel comprising of 64 colors. Visual cues indicated the relevant target color either before ‘pre-cue’ or after ‘retro-cue’ sample presentation. To further probe working memory, delay length was varied. Both birds performed well on this task. Cue type had a strong influence on overall performance, which was mostly unaffected by delay length. The birds consistently showed higher performance in pre-cue trials, indicating that focused attention on the cued sample color significantly improved performance by reducing WM load. This is also reflected in the WM representations of the colors. Higher demands in retro-cue trials were mitigated by a more categorical representation of the colors. In the pre-cue trials, attentional resources were focused on the relevant sample, which lead to a more continuous and thus more precise representation. All in all, we demonstrated that jackdaws can efficiently use the cues given by their environment to adapt the allocation of necessary cognitive resources in solving a WM task.