Due dates are critical for managing time-sensitive work. The most common use for due dates is to make sure urgent tasks are handled in the near term.
But sometimes you need to handle certain tasks, such as routine winterizing, at specified points in the far future. In such cases, it’s handy to keep these far-off requests out of your active queue, so that they don’t distract you (and mess up your completion-time stats). Tikkit makes this easy to do.
Setting and changing due dates
New requests
Set due dates on new requests by clicking the “Add due date” link in the right hand sidebar of a new request.
By default, the due date will be set to one week out. Click the date to edit the day or time. You can set due dates as far in the future as you like, but not in the past.
Remove the due date by clicking the “Remove due date” link.
Existing requests
For existing requests, you can find due date information in the right-hand info bar. Click on the due date to change or remove it.
Tracking and viewing due dates
View columns
You can customize any request list to include a column showing due date. As with all list columns, you can sort by due date, and the values are color-coded to help you see at a glance which requests are due the soonest. Learn more about customizing request list columns.
Custom view filters
Custom views have powerful filtering options for due dates. Create views that show only requests that are due in the near future—or already overdue—so you can focus on the work that is most pressing. Learn more about setting up custom views.
Creating requests in the future
One problem with creating a request with a far-off due date is that it makes your time-to-completion statistics harder to interpret. If a request took six months to close out, is that because nobody ever got around to it, or is it because the request really wasn’t supposed to be worked on in the near term?
To address this issue, and to help keep your task queue clear of stuff you don’t need to think about now, Tikkit allows you to postpone creation of requests until soon before they’re due.
When creating a new request, just check “Create the request in the future” below the due date. By default, the request is created one day before it is due, but you can adjust the time interval by clicking on it.
Viewing and modifying pending requests
Requests that are scheduled for future creation don’t really exist yet, so they are neither open nor closed. Instead, they are pending. To view them and edit them, click on the “Pending” view in the left-hand sidebar, beneath the “Scheduled” heading.
Edit pending requests as you would any other. Unlike regular requests, pending requests contain information about the creation schedule, which you can view or edit.
Be aware that some changes are irreversible. In particular, if you remove the due date or modify the creation time so that it is no longer in the future, the request will be created immediately and transition from pending to open. Once a request is open, it cannot be changed back to pending.
Tracking pending requests with custom views
Use the “Status” filter in custom views to limit views to only pending requests, or to exclude pending requests entirely. Learn more about setting up custom views.