If you’ve been following this blog closely (and bless you if you have been), then you may have noticed there were no updates to it last week. That’s because I took the week off, as other commitments (as diligently reported by the Recurrer app) were more urgent.
When other items – usually one-off tasks that are more important than anything else for the moment – take temporary priority above everything else, Recurrer rearranges the other tasks around it.
This is how the app is designed to work, balancing your task load so you’re not overwhelmed by things on your to do list for today. But if you have more tasks to do in a certain time frame than you have time in which to do them, then something will inevitably give. Recurrer will push the less urgent tasks down the list, but if you continue to ignore them, they’ll still turn red as they become overdue. I offered some suggestions to how to deal with that in a previous blog post, but here’s another approach.
If you find the sight of red, overdue tasks too overwhelming, snooze them. Simply right-swipe on the task and select the ‘snooze’ option. This will move the task to the bottom of the list where you’re less likely to feel the pressure of its overduedness.
However, just because you’ve hidden it away from view momentarily, that doesn’t mean that you can forget it forever. Sometimes that’s appropriate, if, for example, it’s a task that’s part of a project that’s been put on hold. But usually you want to check in on your snoozed tasks every now and then. Ideally, at a time when you’re less overwhelmed with urgent tasks that are stressing you out.
The best way to ensure you don’t forget your snoozed tasks hidden safely away at the bottom of your to do list is, of course, with another recurring task. Set up a task to ‘check your snoozed tasks’, have it recur every 7-21 days (say) and there you are. Once things are back to being sane again, this task will pop into your list of tasks to do today and you can take the tentative steps towards getting back on track with the things you were forced to temporarily put aside.
