“No due date” tasks as another option for helping manage your time
Keeping track of the things you need to do and getting them done can include delaying some tasks that can wait until later, to prevent them from getting in the way of the tasks that really do need to be done sooner.
It may work well for you to just set a day’s time-critical tasks to Big cat priority and that day’s less time-critical tasks to Small cat priority.
Or during busy times, it may work well for you to edit some less time-critical tasks to replace their current due dates with plausible dates for revisiting them later when you expect to have more time.
A third option when time is tight is to edit some of the more time-flexible tasks to set them to No due date. Because Kitty Todo groups all No due date tasks together at the very end of the Future section of your task list, depending on the specifics of these tasks, it may make more sense to you to have some of them grouped together like that where you can easily review and choose from them all at once when you have more time, instead of individually mixing them in with your other tasks on various dates.
Using “No due date” tasks for brainstorming lists
Sometimes you may have brainstorming sessions where you come up with and enter a bunch of tasks for things you want or need to do in the future, without figuring out specific dates/timeframes for them yet.
If you’re going to get back to planning dates for those tasks later that day, you may want to just leave them set to the default Today due date when creating them, but otherwise, again, setting them to No due date means that when you are ready to start setting dates for them you can easily find them all grouped together at the end of the Future section of your tasks list.
Just note that No due date tasks don’t repeat, because a repeating task has to have a date to repeat from, so for any of those brainstorming tasks that will repeat, you’ll need to wait to specify the repeat unit and frequency until you edit the task later to select an actual due date.
“No due date” tasks and “Topic backlog”
– Dan Draper
I wrote down a simple list of things I wanted to learn. I called it my Topic Backlog. A list on its own isn’t really that useful though. What I needed was a system to prioritise, add and most importantly, check off items!
I just read Dan Draper’s article How to prioritize what you learn by creating a topic backlog. Although it was written to address programmers learning to stay focused on the task at hand while saving related goals and interests in a “topic backlog” to be prioritized later, it can certainly give you things to think about regarding prioritizing and scheduling tasks in general, the role of practice in improving your skills and understanding, and effectively sticking to habits — check it out.
Personally, what immediately jumped into my mind while reading the article was Kitty Todo’s No due date tasks as topic backlog, which made me want to write this help/blog post. 🙂
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