4 Reasons You Have Overdue Tasks ( + How to Fix It )

Ah, overdue tasks. Whether you're using ClickUp or trello or asana or wrike or Monday or a sticky note, overdue tasks really just eat at you. They eat at me at least, and especially now that I'm managing a team. We're using ClickUp, but it doesn't really matter what you're using. Once you're managing a team and you have things that are reliant on those deadlines, the cost of overdue tasks becomes very real. Not only do overdue tasks hurt morale, make you feel like you've got a weight on your shoulders, and maybe just feel frustrating, they can also have actual costs when it comes to not meeting certain client deadlines, not producing deliverables on time. And it is an ongoing struggle for myself, and probably for you as well, to figure out the right way to ensure that you're being ambitious with your due dates. But you're not constantly fighting overdue tasks. And in this video, I'm going to break down four common reasons why you might have overdue tasks. This is me telling you, but also just me telling future me, because it happens to the best of us. So I figured since this video is going to be me telling my future self to get your stuff together, I thought a more soft venue would be appropriate. So let's just dig right into the very first reason why you are probably having too many overdue tasks. And that is optimism. You are sitting there thinking, ah, film a quick video. Sure. It'll only take an hour. Two hours later, you're still talking to yourself in a dark room with a camera. Yeah. When you are thinking, things only take five minutes. And when you are filled with that optimism and enthusiasm, you need to take a step back. The more happy you feel in the moment, the more motivated you feel, the more inaccurate your time estimates are going to be. Because the fact is, when you're estimating time, you should probably estimate it based on your average productivity. And when you're in a high energy space or you're feeling super positive about the day, your productivity level or your perceived productivity level is going to be higher than your what is normal. And when we're planning due dates, we want to plan based on normal level, not neurotic Layla Monday morning level. So that is the first check mark for making sure we have less overdue tasks. Keep an eye on that optimism both for yourself and for your teammates. One interesting fact I noticed with clients we worked with when they were managing their capacity or planning their projects. If you asked people on a Friday what they could accomplish in the coming weeks, it always tended to be a bigger amount. They're like, yeah, next week we're gonna crush it. Because by Friday it seems, seems like at least people's energies were so high, they were so optimistic. They're ready for the weekend. Anything in the future is not a problem. But if you ask them to estimate what work they're going to complete in the following week on a Wednesday, the accuracy tended to be better. They were better able to estimate what they were to accomplish in the middle of the week versus the end of the week. And this is just anecdote, right? This is just my own experience. But early on in the week and at the end of the week, optimism to me seems at its highest. And around the middle of the week, we get kind of brought down into that reality. And to me at least, planning, Planning due dates and things in the middle of the week tends to get a more realistic outcome. So if you are struggling with being overly optimistic, try moving your planning time to the middle of the week. Now, that brings me to topic number two, or reason number two, why you might have overdue due dates. You are too focused. Let's say you are planning your due dates in the middle of the week and it's Wednesday and you're sitting there and you're like, yeah, next week I'm going to do this, that and the other. Try not to zoom in too much, especially when it comes to special events or launches or something you're really excited about, like creating this video. When you're really excited about something, you tend to focus in on that and you think, oh man, this launch would be so much better if we did this webinar, this email and you tend to lose sight of the other things you've already committed to because things that are normal or routine aren't as special. So they don't take up as much brain space as these new, exciting, shiny things. However, to do the new and shiny things, you need to be able to accomplish your routines as well. So if you are someone who is too focused, you get excited by one project and forget everything else exists. And that's why you end up putting unrealistic due dates or putting realistic due dates, yet not meeting them. The fix here would be create some kind of ritual for yourself when it comes to planning due dates. Some kind of holistic area where you can see everything else you've committed to before you add one more thing onto the plate. We're ClickUp users here, so for us, that might look like going to our everything view called My tasks, looking at the stuff we've already committed to for ourselves over the coming weeks and considering keeping can I really take on more in addition to that and other any other vacations I have and using that view to guide your decision making. Because if you're just looking at a bunch of tasks and thinking oh, when can I do them? You tend to lose perspective of the other stuff you've got going on. And having some kind of holistic area to view all of that is going to be super helpful for this problem. So that was problem number two, getting too focused or too excited about one topic. The third common issue I see come up with due dates is around six scale. So this is similar to focus, but this is more about how when you have really big projects, it can be hard to estimate how long they take. Things like planning a launch, redesigning a website, filming a whole month's worth of videos, batching content. All of those things are really big projects. And if, say we're using our task management tool and we have one task called redi website that is incredibly demoralizing to see and and incredibly difficult to estimate the time or due dates for. The tip, here is a really simple one. Break things down. Rather than having something like redesign your whole website, have each step as a subtask or a sub subtask or a sub sub sub subtask and break out everything that's going to happen. Because even though you can't estimate how long it'll take you to redesign your website, within reason you can probably estimate how long it'll take you to proofread the about page, right? Plus it's a lot more motivating to be able to check that box versus seeing a task remain in progress for weeks or even months. So if you're going to set due dates, make sure they're set using realistic chunks. Or don't set due dates at all and use more of a grab bag like just do whatever's next approach, which is kind of a whole separate video. So we'll move on to number four, the fourth reason you have so many overdue tasks, which is probably the most common of every client I've ever worked with. You don't pay attention to overdue tasks. You and your team have a culture of ignoring due dates. There's no accountability for getting something done by the due date. There's no reason to really push yourself or to make those estimates more accurate. So rather than changing your behaviors in the three ways I already identified, you just kind of ignore them. You let them pile up and eventually you'll figure them out. Maybe, but your culture is that way. So the solution for this last one, for not caring about overdue due dates is care, and better yet, build some kind of process to continually care about due dates and deadlines. One easy way to do that would be to have, say, your weekly team meeting. In that team meeting, have a five minute section where you flash up all the overdue tasks on the team and just like, hey guys, here's what's looking like it's overdue. Who needs help? What's going on? Why are they stuck here? And just have that discussion to figure out why things are falling behind. Odds are you'll uncover some of the three issues we've already talked about. Or you might figure out someone's just stuck, confused, waiting on a client. Any of that information might be gathered from seeing those overdue tasks, which is going to be more meaningful than just seeing a big old pile of overdue that no one even notices. If you're a ClickUp user, one helpful way to do this would be to create a team monitoring dashboard, which I talk about in this video here, where you can actually keep an eye on these overdues across your entire workspace. It can be a nice way to keep this kind of rate in focus or your team calls. No matter what tool you're using, when you have more than a handful of overdue tasks, it can be incredibly overwhelming and difficult to digest. What exactly is important? What's the priority? The 50 overdue tasks or the two tasks due today? And we want to avoid getting into that kind of anxiety puddle of having somebody overdue tasks and instead keep our overdue tasks in a very, very small pool and treat them as something that actually matters. So moving forward, when we're setting due dates, we treat that as something that actually matters. So that way, when we're looking at client deadlines, or when we're considering who's going to be off on vacation, or when we're considering when can we launch that website? We know when, when things are going to get done because we trust the system, we trust the deadlines, and we trust the people who are going to make sure that these things happen. So that future Layla and anyone else watching, this is my message to all of you. When you find yourself in the situations where overdue due dates are starting to pile up, might be giving you a bit of anxiety or stress, think about the three reasons why the possible solutions and make sure that fourth preventative measure of making sure overdue tasks are a collective cultural priority, make sure that is the case. This kind of process is one that constantly needs to be reviewed. Kind of like physical fitness, right? We need to keep coming back to it. So if you find yourself in a period where overdues are getting a little crazy, use these tools to focus back in. Those are the four most common reasons why you will have lots of overdue tasks in your task management system. Your ClickUp, your asana, your trello, your wrike, your Monday, whatever you might be using and my four suggestions for how to fix them. If you have other symptoms or other causes for overdue tasks that you'd like to share and help out the community here, please do leave them in the comments below. But otherwise, thank you guys so much for joining me on this relaxed episode of the YouTube channel. I'll see you guys back here next time for another video about ClickUp process and everything in between. Until next time, enjoy the process.