Most of us are experts at getting our to-dos out of our minds and into whatever task management system we use. Everything from GTD to plain old sticky notes gives you a sense of empowerment once your world is on some sort of manageable system.

But what happens as the to-dos don’t move from to-do to to-done? Your list becomes crowded, unmanageable and before long you’ve abandoned your system and life has descended back into chaos. This is where the power of the due date comes in.

Now lets review what a due-date is. Most people think it’s self-explanatory;

A date when something must be complete by.

But not all tasks have external forces pushing you towards a completion date. If you need to clean the fridge, the world will not explode if it’s not done by Friday. So items like this get pushed farther and farther down the list of priorities. But what if we play a mental game with ourselves and change the word must to should. So now the definition reads.

A date when something should be complete by

Now we can play all types of mental games. A week is more than a reasonable amount of time to get off your duff and clean the fridge. Do you have plans this week? Fine, make it for the week after next, but just make sure you assign a reasonable date to it. Lets put extra emphasis on reasonable, because a date that can’t be hit becomes even more of a distraction.

We’ve got a due date on our tasks, now what? Psychology does the rest. If you’re the type of person that keeps to-dos, then chances are you’re also the type of person that derives satisfaction from checking things off the list and experiences sadness or remorse when they stay on the list. The key is to make sure that your to-do system has someway to alert you when you have a task with a due date approaching or when a task is overdue. This signal is almost like the two-minute warning in football. It signals the brain that you’re behind and you’ve got shit to do! It motivates you in a way that can’t be explained without a PH.D.

We are a weird people psychologically, but we can use this insanity to our advantage. After reading this, go through your to-dos and start assigning realistic due dates to everything you want to move off the list.

There’s a special high that comes with checking off an item off your list. Use this post to stay high all day and all night.

p.s.

Just to drive the point home, this post has been on my to-do list for a week. As soon as Omnifocus told me the task was overdue, I felt like I had to have it complete by the time I head to bed tonight. So I’m sitting in Third Coast Comics, making sure I can check this off my list tonight.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 11:26 pm and is filed under GTD, Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.