Unexpected Guests Unwelcome #

One of the worst features I have ever seen in project management tools is the automatic rollover of incomplete tasks to the next day because 

Having unexpected guests coming to your house is never a good experience because they are always interrupting something that you were doing that you had rather keep doing instead of taking care of them because you would have wanted to meet with them then you would have had made plans to meet.

The same applies to the Rollover feature of many project management tools that automates the scheduling of tasks to the next available slot if they weren’t completed by their original scheduled date. In theory this seems like a good idea but in practice it has sa snowballing effect that becomes unmanageable in the long run. 

The Rollover feature fails to recognize the fact that you have future plans and even if you would have the option to make tasks dependant on other tasks, so that if one task is rescheduled all other tasks are also shifted, there will be many instances in which some tasks or projects have a deadline which adds even more complexity to the Rollover feature. On top of this, many project management tools allow others to assign work directly to you which 

Any attempt to make the Rollover feature smarter adds complexity to the whole process of work management to the point that you need to take into consideration the side effects of the Rollover when you plan you week.

So now you have all these decisions be made for you not by you. Automating such an important part and you are the only one with the sufficient context knowledge to know which ones are the current priorities

Maybe this has some utility in the mass-production world where one line of work can only perform a certain task and any delay in the current tasks affects all subsequent tasks so everything can shift but fore sure it has no utility in the creative and dynamic world in which an individual works on many projects with varying scopes and shifting priorities.

The alternative is to allocate time for review every week and asks the questions “How critical are these things left undone?”, “What can be left undone?”, “If I am rescheduling all these tasks, what else that is already planned will not get done?”, “I have been dragging these tasks for weeks now, can I delete them and move on?”. This way you take back control over your schedule and each item on your schedule is intentionally there not happens to be there because of automation.

And like uninvited guests, they don’t have to come bagging you door to see you because you managed to go out with them from time to time.