Start Dates after Due Dates

[Trajan McGill]

Hi MLO team,

I've struggled on several occasions with setting up systems for using MLO due to the fact that I can't set a task's start date after its end date without the end date automatically getting adjusted to match the new start date.

One of the great advantages of MLO over some other task managers is the ability to specify separate start and end dates. For some reason, a lot of people who design software for planning work don't seem ever to have thought of the fact that someone may wish to work on a task prior to its due date.

However, this treatment of these dates as independent data poinst doesn't go quite far enough in MLO. In the real world, where predictions are imperfect and priorities shift, a great many things happen after their target due dates. And for many kinds of projects and tasks, it remains important for planning purposes to continue tracking the original due date, even while actual work is scheduled later than that.

Consider a list of activities that are supposed to be completed by certain dates, where those dates haven't been met, but the activities still need to be completed, and their original due dates still have some bearing on what order they should be completed in. An example might be reading assignments for a college class. Imagine if you fall a week behind. This means multiple due dates have been passed. You still need to do all the readings, but you cannot possibly do the entire week's readings in a single day. One would need each day to select some of the past-due readings and add them to today's list of tasks (i.e., give them a start date of today) alongside the tasks already assigned to today, doing extra work each day until caught up. However, the moment one sets a start date past the due date, the former due date is lost, and with it is lost all information about what order the assignments were meant to have been done in, or how far overdue each task is. In fact, the instant a person assigns a present or future start date, it no longer can be seen that that task is overdue at all. And it may make a great deal of difference in my choices of how to go about my day, to be able to differentiate between tasks originally scheduled for today and tasks which are already overdue and have been pushed to today.

I'm happy to elaborate further. But I've run into this as a significant constraint on numerous occasions, and would love to see the ability to de-link start date and due date altogether. There is no great workaround, either, because the only date fields available are start date, due date, and next review date; so there isn't a spare field not presently in use that I can pull into service as a stand-in for "original due date". (An alternative option would be to allow us to add custom fields, but that's a bigger request.)

Thanks for considering this request.

[Jason Seaman]

Hey, Trajan, thanks for your interesting post, I enjoyed considering your thought. Though not a direct response, perhaps the following offers some helpful ideas.

In grad school, I depended heavily on MLO.

First, I encoded the due date into the task caption. For example, "PHL710, Reading wk 1". I also set the start and due dates. So, if I changed task dates, the caption would maintain an encoding of the original due date ("wk 1", "wk 2", "wk 3")

I did *not* use "complete tasks in order," so task: "PHL710, submit wk 1" would become active independent of whether task "PHL710, reading wk 1" was active or completed. And I could mark an assignment as submitted, even if I didn't feel the reading was entirely done.

Second, I used contexts to organize tasks by priority, for example, "@1-Submissions", "@2-Writing", and "@3-Reading". This way, tasks are prioritized in the Active Actions view. I could not get the Importance and Urgency fields to do what I wanted.

If you have questions, feel free to let me know.

cheers,
..jason

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