Due date is not a ‘do’ date

Many task manager apps have a ‘due’ date as the only date you can set for a task. This means you sort tasks by their due dates to see what’s on your plate for a given day.

I find it astonishing that Apple Reminders, Todoist, TickTick, Microsoft To-Do, AnyDo, a bunch of other task manager apps and even behemoths like Asana and Monday fail to understand that the due date is not a ‘do’ date.

If a large task or a project that requires many work hours is due today and you only see this on that day, chances are you are in trouble. Many people end up with dozens of overdue tasks in their task managers, leading to an even bigger mess and more anxiety.

The due date is essentially a deadline. It’s a date when the task has to be completed. A finish date, not a start date.

The only task manager I know that gets it right, and the app I’ve been using for years, is Things by Cultured Code. In Things, you can separately set a deadline (a due date) and a ‘when’ date, which is the date when you intend to start working on that thing. I wish more task managers had this feature.

Regardless of your tool of choice, be mindful when setting up a due date as it may not always accurately reflect when you should start working on the task.