Due dates, do dates, and die dates

A calendar is, at its essence, just a list. But how effectively that list is used can transform your calendar from a mostly-neglected application to a finely-tuned productivity tool.

The key to this transformation is the proper care and feeding of your calendar. It is a garbage-in-garbage-out system, so it’s crucial that we make sure that we only add items to our calendar that belong there.

For GTD acolytes like myself, it feels like we rise and fall by the quality of our lists. After all, these various context lists pretty act like an outboard brain, telling us what we’re supposed to be doing at the given moment, so if we throw action items onto them willy-nilly, and if they’re not tended to regularly, it all falls apart, becoming a system that you don’t use because you can’t trust it. Specifically, this means that anything you place on your calendar, you should treat as a promise.

But—and this is the key—don’t use your calendar for task management, as it’s really meant for time management¹. I really like an idea Merlin Mann² has discussed, where he suggests that productivity is not just about managing your time, but also about managing your attention. Let Omnifocus (or whatever) handle your tasks, and let your calendar handle your time.

There was a good Mac Power Users episode on calendar management that got me thinking about how I use mine, and how I deal with time management in general.

Due Dates

It feels like including this field in a task-management system is probably one of the most polarizing conversation in GTD-Land³. I go back and forth on it, myself (a time required field makes more sense, maybe, because you can then sort your context lists according to how much free time you have).

For most tasks, however, adding due dates

• makes little sense in the real world;
• clutters your calendar needlessly (it’s no longer a “hard landscape” of real appointments);
• undermines the flexibility of your workflows if you strictly follow these due dates;
• undermines the reliability of your system if you don’t; and
• adds busywork that would probably be unnecessary if you were doing better reviews of your projects and lists.

Still, sometimes a date of some sort makes sense for a particular task. So I tend to use the due-date field as one of two things: a do date, or a die date.

Do Dates

Do dates are for tasks that absolutely need to get done on a certain day or by a certain time. Should these go on your calendar? Renewing your driver’s license, for example, is just such a thing, but you’ll get a notice ahead of time reminding you of this, so you probably don’t need another reminder in your calendar.

What about your wife’s birthday? Sure, that may be on your calendar, but did you give yourself a heads-up early enough to shop for her present, or will she be getting another six-pack of premium carwashes and a box of four-year-old chocolates that you had to pick up at the gas station on the way home because it was a long day at the office and it was the only place still open?⁴ Maybe that’s a good candidate for a do date.

A better one is passport renewal. For myself, it’s on a five-year renewal period, but I don’t get any kind of reminder, and if it has expired, I’ve only got six months to get it done if I want the “simplified” renewal option. But it still requires a few things, like getting a photo taken, locating my old passport, completing a form, and mailing it out, so it’s a project, and I really don’t want to find myself with an expired passport two weeks before a business trip. So while I’ll have a 5-year review cycle for my “renew passport” project, I’ll go ahead and add some do dates to those tasks that are more time sensitive.

Die Dates

Die dates are for tasks that are far less important—optional, even—but that still have some kind of time sensitivity to them. While it’s not paramount that you actually complete the task (like an item on your Someday/Maybe list), you may only have a limited amount of time to do it.

Looking into concert tickets, for example, is just such a thing. Popping into a store that’s having a sale on iTunes cards is yet another. It’s okay if these things get skipped, but they are in your system for a reason, and if you don’t give yourself a reminder, you’re likely to miss the opportunity because of its limited-time availability.