You should be able to tell what needs attention without reading a single date.
The three states
| Colour | Means | Do |
|---|---|---|
| Red | The due date has passed. | Deal with it or change the date. |
| Amber | Due today. | Today is the day. |
| Plain | Due in the future. | Nothing. |
The whole row is tinted and the date itself is coloured, so it reads at a glance down a long list rather than needing to be hunted for.
Compared as days, not as moments
A task due today is amber for the whole of today — not red from one minute past midnight, and not red at 5pm because the working day is over.
That sounds obvious and is the thing most systems get wrong. Comparing timestamps rather than dates means everything due today looks overdue by the afternoon, everyone learns to ignore red, and the colour stops meaning anything.
A colour only works while it is rare. If most of your list is red, nobody reads it. That is not a display problem — it means the dates have stopped being real, and the fix is to change them to dates you believe.
A due date with an hour
A project task’s due date, and a project’s end date, can carry an hour as well: the box beside the date in the task panel and the project form is optional. With an hour, the task turns red once that hour has passed rather than at the end of the day, the lists, board, timeline and calendar show it, and the assignee is reminded at that hour. A project’s owner is reminded at its end hour.
Which day it is, and what the hour is, are read in your workspace’s time zone, set in Settings, Organisation, never on the device somebody happens to be holding.
The same system everywhere
Project tasks, CRM follow-ups, visits and calls all use it. Learn it once and it reads the same on every screen.
Using dates that mean something
- Put a due date on everything. A task without one cannot be late, which means it is invisible until somebody remembers it.
- Use the date the work is actually needed, not the date you hope it is finished.
- When a date slips, change it rather than leaving it red. A red row that everybody knows is wrong is noise.
- Review the red ones weekly, not when somebody complains.
Why red stops working
A colour is a signal, and a signal only works while it is unusual. A list where a third of the rows are red is a list nobody reads.
When that happens the problem is never the colour. It is one of two things:
- The dates were never real — somebody set optimistic ones and nobody revisited them.
- The work genuinely is that late, and the red is telling you something you have been avoiding.
Both are worth fixing. Neither is fixed by ignoring the colour.
Changing a date is not cheating
People leave dates wrong because moving them feels like admitting failure. The opposite is true: a date you no longer believe is misinformation, and everybody downstream is planning against it.
Move it, and say why in the task. Then the red rows that remain are the ones that actually need attention.
A useful rule for a weekly review: every red row either gets done, gets a new date, or gets marked blocked with the thing it is waiting for. Nothing stays red and unexplained for a second week.
Where to go next
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