Due dates are killing your productivity – here’s how to do the real work instead
A better system for steady progress
Due dates are a procrastinator's best friend. I’d log them religiously into my calendar and to-do list. Yet, every time, I’d end up racing the clock, scrambling at the last minute to complete work. The pattern was consistent: tasks with far-off deadlines would sit untouched until urgency forced action. It wasn’t poor planning or lack of grit, it was me dodging the hard stuff. I’d break tasks down, sure, but I’d cherry-pick the easy bits and leave the real work for “later.” The fix? It’s not just making subtasks but timing them to force engagement, not avoidance.
Falling into the trap of easy wins
Devs, project managers, anyone with a pulse, we all know the drill: split a task into subtasks, pin a due date, call it done. So why do we still choke? Because we treat due dates like finish lines and subtasks like a buffet. A deadline two weeks out feels like a cushion, so we coast. Subtasks stack up, and we gravitate to the low-hanging fruit – tweaking a UI, writing a quick test – while the meaty stuff (say, wrestling with an API) festers. It’s not laziness; it’s human nature misreading the signals. Parkinson’s Law is more than just time bloating, it’s about us shrinking from the real work until the last second.
Take a developer with a feature due in two weeks. They know it needs backend logic, frontend integration, and testing. They might mentally map it out, but with the due date far off, they start with the fun part and by the time they dig into the hard stuff, blockers pop up, scope creeps, and they’re crunching late, cursing themselves. Sound familiar?
Combatting avoidance with to-do dates
Here’s the shift that changed everything: stop tracking when it’s due and start tracking when to work. Due dates create pressure; to-do dates create progress. You’re not just breaking tasks down, you’re assigning them moments that make you face the tough stuff head-on, not just the easy wins.
Imagine that same feature, due March 24. Instead of one looming deadline, you set:
“Outline requirements and API specs” for March 8.
“Build backend logic” for March 13.
“Hook up the frontend” for March 16.
“Test and debug” for March 21.
Now, you’re engaging early. The backend doesn’t get kicked down the road; it’s tee’d up when you’ve got bandwidth. Each to-do date is a nudge to tackle the real work, not just the easy bits you like doing.
Some tasks resist splitting
Not every job splits neatly and it shouldn’t. Refactoring legacy code, for instance, laughs at tidy subtasks. You can’t always say “fix auth today, optimize queries tomorrow” – it’s a messy, iterative beast. But that’s where to-do dates shine brighter. Instead of forcing a breakdown, set time to dive in: “Poke at the codebase for 45 minutes on Monday,” “Tweak auth logic on Wednesday,” “Chase down query bottlenecks on Friday.” Rather than being rigid steps, these are simple commitments to show up and have consistent contact with the problem in hand.
How I make it work in practice
Here’s my setup:
Hard due dates (like “Deploy feature, March 6”) go in Google Calendar – non-negotiable stakes in the ground.
Subtasks and to-do dates live in Nestful, a dynamic to-do list that surfaces subtasks when they matter.
I put “Deploy feature” as my parent task in Nestful, then the four tasks I mentioned above as subtasks, with their respective to-do dates. I then drop in the less neat tasks, like tackling legacy code, on specific days with an allocated amount of time I intend to spend on them. Example: Spend 45 minutes untangling queries on Friday. I don’t have to finish that task on Friday, but I’ve just gotta engage with it. This tactic allows engagement to snowball, the due date rolls around and things are in an almost-done kind of state. No sweating.
For gnarly projects, I lean on micro-commitments to break the ice: “Open the editor and sketch one function” or “Run the old code and spot one flaw.” These tiny tasks (also complete with to-do dates) trick me into starting, and once I’m in, the real work flows.
Nestful’s Agenda View ties it together, showing me what’s ripe today and what can wait. It means there’s no guesswork, no cherry-picking.
Final thoughts
Due dates and division into sub tasks lets you hide from the hard stuff, picking easy tasks to feel productive while the clock ticks. To-do dates flip that, they’re guideposts that make you face the work that matters, when it matters. Whether it’s a feature you can slice up or a refactor that defies division, the principle holds: schedule the effort, not just the outcome.
Try Nestful.