[Gardener2]

One piece of standard advice is to never use due dates for tasks that aren't really truly due on that day. If you can put it off with just a shrug and a grumble, it shouldn't have a due date. The idea is that if you have things in your due list that aren't _really really due_, you become numb to the list.

I try to follow this advice, though sometimes I slip.

So instead of using due dates to make important tasks more prominent, I use future start dates to make less important tasks less prominent.

So my usual procedure is:

- If it really has a due date, I enter it. For example, "Prepare presentation for Friday meeting" has to be done before Friday's meeting or I may as well not do it. So it gets a due date. The due date should really be _Friday_, since that's the drop dead date, but I have a bad habit of giving it a due date of, say, Wednesday, which once again results in my becoming numb to my Due list.

- Otherwise, a task gets no due date when first entered.

- This means that for every weekly review I have a bunch of tasks that would be good to do, but of course I'm not going to do them all. So I walk through the tasks and give them start dates in the future - a few days, a few weeks, a few months. The start date isn't when the task is _due_, it's when I might reasonably start working on it.

- Then, the main view that I use to scan for tasks is set to show only Available tasks, so that the ones with the future start dates are hidden.

- But if I get on a roll on a given context, or (ha!) finish all the work that I hoped to get done, I can just shift to Remaining tasks and see the ones that I've put off.

I tend to "touch up" my start dates between weekly reviews, because new tasks crowd in and make my list too long for comfort.

This does largely negate the value of using Start Dates to eliminate tasks that I truly can't work on yet - for example, I can't work on this year's taxes until this year is over. But the other method of using due dates to mark things that are only important, not due, negates the value of Due Dates, and I consider Due Dates more important.

Gardener