Deadlines
I use Todoist for my daily task and project planning. Whether or not you currently have a task-management system in place, you should check out Todoist. It’s a great tool. When I create tasks in Todoist, 90% of them have deadlines. I set a day that I want to accomplish a task or have it done by. When I set a date, I get that thing done every time.
When I don’t set a date, that task gets pushed off and pushed off. It never becomes my main focus. Without the pressure of a deadline, I seem to have a hard time getting these things done. Why do I continue to create deadline-free tasks? Some of my tasks don’t have a deadline, they’re ongoing tasks that I will never finish (like a reminder to work out each morning). I have these there to simply remind me in the back of my mind. But it doesn’t work — I don’t work out every morning. Possibly because working out is harder than updating a video file at work, and possibly because I don’t set a deadline on the task.
I have tasks in my Todoist account from 2016. Things that I’ll get to next week. I review my tasks without a deadline every Thursday morning, and yet they still don’t often get done. They don’t get done because I know that I can just review them again next Thursday. I don’t need to take care of them this week.
The funny thing about my reliance on deadlines is this: probably 50% of my tasks with deadlines have arbitrary deadlines! It doesn’t matter if I design a new display for our tradeshow booth Monday or Friday, but if I plan it for Monday that’s when it’s going to get done. I know the deadline is arbitrary; I know I gave myself the deadline; I know I picked the date. But I still care about when that deadline says I need to get something done.
I care about the deadlines because Todoist has gamified their software. You get points (called karma) for completing tasks, and tasks that are overdue show up in red. Not surprisingly, years of seeing red as failure on schoolwork has conditioned me to avoid red text at all costs. This gamification keeps me making new tasks and completing them (for karma), and it keeps me from missing deadlines. Todoist gamified their system for two reasons: to help their users get more done, and to keep their users coming back and using their product more.
3 thoughts about task-list deadlines.
- I need to get better at accomplishing tasks that don’t have a hard deadline, or
- I need to get better at assigning deadlines to tasks that may not have one, and
- Gamification is a valuable way to get things done yourself and inspire your customers to do the same.
