Due date

A due date is the date a task is supposed to be finished by. Attached to a card, it lets a tool answer useful questions automatically: what's overdue, what's due this week, what's due today. For client work and anything with an external commitment, the due date is the single most important field on a task — it's the promise you made.

Due dates vs. priorities

Due dates and priority levels answer different questions. A due date says when something must be done; a priority says how much it matters. A task can be high-priority with no deadline (a P1 bug — fix it now, no specific date) or low-priority with a hard deadline (a routine report due Friday). Conflating the two leads to bad scheduling; tracking both gives you a real picture.

The over-dating trap

The most common mistake is assigning a due date to everything. When every card has a deadline, the ones that genuinely matter get lost in a sea of self-imposed dates you'll cheerfully blow past. Soon "overdue" means nothing because half the board is red. Reserve due dates for real commitments — external deadlines, dependencies, things with actual consequences — and leave everything else undated.

Due dates for client work

For freelancers, the due date is where deliverables and client expectations meet. A board with a clear due this week view replaces the anxious mental math of "what's coming up?" The discipline is to set the date when you make the commitment, not to back-fill optimistic dates onto everything in the backlog.

How GritShip handles this

Every GritShip task has an optional due date. The tool surfaces upcoming and overdue work without turning the whole board into a deadline tracker — dates are opt-in per card. Pro adds a calendar view for teams that want to see their deadlines laid out by week rather than scanning cards.