“Due on” vs. “Due by” dates in task management apps

You are Using One Todo List Feature That Kills Your Productivity

Todoist, Wunderlist, Google Notes, Trello, they all have it!

Todo lists help me become a cyborg by outsourcing a lot of my memory to my computer and phone. The next big thing will be outsourcing certain decisions around task management: namely when to do what.

Status Quo

I was a big fan of Wunderlist, so when Microsoft finally managed to shut it down — years after acquiring it, I had to look for other options. That is mostly because I find Microsoft accounts to be super annoying AND the new Microsoft app “Todo” lacks features that made Wunderlist great, such as comments. Anyhow, I moved to Todoist, which is not as pretty but has all the Wunderlist features I love.

The way I use Todoist: Every idea, thought and task is written down, wherever I am, in the inbox. When I get to work, I first sort things from my inbox. There are 3 main things I change:

1. Due date
2. List it is in
3. Priority

Then I go to my “Today” tab and work through my tasks.

The problem right now

ALL todo list apps use “due on” dates. So the task is surfaced in my “today” list, on the day that I say it should be surfaced. That is

a) the simple solution (the algorithm for that is literally 3 lines of code)
b) good for some tasks, which are of a specific nature. If I want to congratulate my grandma on her birthday, then I need to be reminded on that day, not 3 days before.

The nature of most tasks, however, is that there is only a “due by” date.

The presentation that is due next Friday, can be completed today or a day before the deadline. From today till the due date it needs to be done at some point. The workaround for me is, to pick a date that is relatively less busy in those next two weeks and put that date as the deadline. Then, I need to add the real, external deadline, to the title of the task so I don’t forget that. Then I might get into the problem, that the day I picked might come and I realize that I am too busy for this task. This later phenomenon happens quite frequently and the result is, that every morning I wake up to more tasks than I can do that day, so I need to reschedule some. This is ok, and still better than paper-based todo lists or not having any. But the core problem is: I spend time every day to go through a decision tree that a computer could do much better, namely: which task to do next.

Within any given day, I still need to reassign a lot of things, because when I set a task to a certain date, I don’t check if that day is already busy or not. I also frequently catch myself missprioritizing. That is, I don’t start with the tasks I should be starting with. The reason, apart from awareness and willpower, is that decision and consequence are too close together. And so the consequence (having to do a chosen task now) influences the decision (which task do I do now?) i.e., if I don’t like a task, I am less likely to choose it as my next thing to do.

But the root cause of the challenges above is the fact that ALL todo list apps and concepts have “due on” dates — and NEVER “due by”.

The solution

At the core, there is only one thing that should influence which task is done next: the due date. The importance of a task only matters if you are so busy that some tasks fail their deadlines and you thus have a preference of which tasks are better and which ones are worse to not complete on time.

This could have been Wunderlist, had they integrated “due by” dates, detailed importance and duration

I would love to have an app, where I add tasks with the following data points:

• Due date: Default is a “due by” date, but I can also turn it into a “due on” date for those tasks that require this (my grandma’s birthday).
• Importance: To help the app prioritize in case not all tasks can be done, this is necessary. The app will also anticipate more tasks coming up, and thus, if enough time is available still prioritize important ones.
• Duration: A key ingredient to deciding on what to do next is the duration of the task. This needs to be abbreviated to 3–5 options (<5min, <20min, <1h, <4h). No single task should take more than 4h in this app. Just break it down.

Obviously, not all of these need to be added. I love the concept of the inbox, where thoughts are dumped while on the go or working on other things. But these three ingredients are what would allow me to outsource a lot of decisions to a computer.

This is what it could look like: laser-focussed on just the next task

The working interface

So far the changes were not profound from a design/frontend perspective. So here is the radical part on the frontend: There needs to be a “work” button, which can optionally be locked, that switches the interface to a different one, where only the next task is shown. It would probably be necessary to have a queue where one can check on the next 30 or so tasks to make sure they all make sense in case one is paranoid. Anyways, in the work mode, there should be nothing but the next task. One cannot get distracted by other tasks, there is only one task to look at, and that is what needs to get done. Trust the computer. Maybe there should be a “can’t complete now” button, in case one is waiting for feedback. But in general, the next step is to get this one task done, tick it off, and then be presented with the next one.

Feedback

This new version of a todo list app has, for the first time, some machine learning features. It needs to learn how many more tasks you usually add in a day. This one can easily be done by just analyzing the data that is already available. One could ask users for more feedback, e.g. on how long tasks took in the end, to get better at understanding the user’s bias in estimating task duration.

Why someone should build this

I have no interest in building this myself for now. I also think this is more of a feature than a product. Here is why Todoist, Microsoft, or any other todo list company should add it though:

• Easily hidden on the front end. This could be an advanced feature that one needs to pay extra for. It is only for frequent users anyways.
• You get a real lock-in effect. When I switched from Wunderlist to Todoist, that was a matter of 3 minutes. They all have open APIs to export and import tasks and so there is not much keeping a user at a specific app.
• All task management apps converge on the Wunderlist ideas, so apart from “due by” dates, I don’t see any real innovation on the horizon.

If you have found such a tool, or are interested in building one, I’d be glad to have a chat with you (Linkedin is on my Medium profile). If you know someone working on task management software, forward them this article.

Edit 31.3.2022

I am now using Motion, which has exactly this feature: ‘due by’ instead of ‘due on’ dates. It fills tasks into the gaps between meetings in an effort to get everything done on time. You don’t think & schedule, you just look at the calendar and you know what to do next. The UI is still super ugly — but it works. Can only recommend it!