Managing Due Dates

How does the community handle due dates?

I find myself extending due dates for tasks and was curious to see what are some best practices from the community for managing them. Are there community members that have more than one due date for a task (i.e. content due date vs. external due date)? Do people create custom fields for dates that are flexible vs firm/drop dead due dates? When dates get pushed out do people use an Original Due Date vs Completion date field?

Just curious to see what other users are doing, what works for them/what doesn't.

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Comments

Trevor Tollefsbol

Hi @Daniel Garcia,

Our goal when setting up our project schedules is to create a target timeline se we can compare the actual timeline to completion relative to the target timeline. To achieve this, we create a "Snapshot" in the Gantt view the day the project is launched. After that, due dates are moved to match reality. We compare our reality to the projected timeline to help us reflect on why a due date may have been pushed out so we can understand how to improve in the future. Sometimes we even beat a project schedule and can see where this happened in the development cycle.

Below is a screenshot of a current project that is actually beating the projected timeline. Using this information, we can identify potential areas we can improve out project timelines.

Hope you find this helpful. Cheers!

Sven Passinger

Hi @Daniel Garcia

we have only one due date per task. If we have two due dates as you example one internal and one external it means having a task for the internal deadline (normaly this is an approval or a meeting) and afterwards a follow up task to put all things from the approval or meeting into the customer presentation, which than has the external due date.

@Trevor Tollefsbols setup with the Snapshot we used also sometimes. We find one drwaback: you can automate. You just have a visual idea of timeshift. So we made via API a bot to fill a custom field with the initial due date of the task. So you can compare the custom field value to the actual value of the task. Really a feature a program like Wrike should have build in ☹️

Daniel Garcia

Thanks @Trevor Tollefsbol & @Sven Passinger! I'm always curious to see what everybody else uses and what works for them. For me, in my personal experience, I like only having one due date for the tasks. The due date is the date that all the work should be completed by including any reviews, approvals and/or any edits. We should be factoring in this additional review time for every task, sometimes we do and sometimes we don't factor in enough time (especially for external reviews and workload). Great chatting!