How to get around the midnight deadline so you can be your productive self
I'm a night owl. I pretty much come alive after dinner. We're mostly the kind of family that when we head to bed, we know that “see you tomorrow” actually means “see you later today.”
I've tried any number of times to turn my schedule around, and I haven't succeeded yet. (Doesn't mean that I still don't try occasionally!)
I'm mostly of the same mind as Molly Priddy who thinks we gave morning people way too much power.
That, and being a night owl doesn't necessarily makes us any less healthy and wise, and might even make us a bit wealthier.
Getting things done as a night owl with Todoist
The task manager I have on my personal productivity stack at the moment is Todoist. For the most part it works well for me. Like any app that involves scheduling of any kind, there has to be some time of the day when today becomes tomorrow. Todoist sets this at midnight, and there's no way to change it.
Since I currently work past midnight more often than not, Todoist does what it does and all of my unfinished tasks that were scheduled for today become overdue at the stroke of midnight.
Overdue tasks make me sad — especially if I'm still working on them! — but what's a night owl to do?
No need to lie to fake out Todoist's gamification
Todoist has gamification built into it with a karma system and streaks. You get karma points for using Todoist as it was intended, and can build up streaks by completing a certain number of tasks per day and per week.
For quite a while, I was lying to Todoist to keep my streaks. There would be a mad rush to go to Todoist and “complete” a task before midnight, because … I hadn't completed all of the tasks I had set out to do, because it was too early. (This is probably weird to all of your morning people. I don't care.)
Or, somewhere between 11:45 pm and midnight I would simply push all of the due dates to tomorrow so that I didn't have overdue tasks lingering around, which eventually chips away at my karma.
In other words, I really wasn't using Todoist. I was just pretending to use it correctly.
The task recurrence didn't work as designed either
All of these task-completion games I was playing near midnight also messed with the built-in task recurrence features that I liked to use.
Let's say I wanted to process some office papers every night. So I create a recurring task “Process office papers” and have it repeat every day.
Midnight approaches, and I haven't done it.
I have two options, neither of which are really good. First, I can complete the task before midnight, even though I haven't done it. This creates a new task on the proper day (tomorrow) but I have to remember to do it, lest I lie to myself. Second, I could move the task to tomorrow, but assuming I did want to do the task, I didn't get proper credit for it.
Note that in order to maintain the “every day” part of the task, I do need to do something with it before midnight. Say it's Wednesday, and I let the task go overdue. If I complete the task after midnight, it will create a task that's due Friday, not Thursday (because tomorrow is now Friday, having crossed into Thursday).
Labels and filters to suit my late-night working
(Labels come with Todoist Free. You get three filters with Todoist Free and 150 with Todoist Pro. For me Pro is well worth the price.)
I can't make Todoist view tomorrow as any later than midnight, but I can simply come to terms that my productivity crosses past midnight and think through what I want to remember to do before I go to bed in the wee hours.
The solution is pretty clean and I'm liking it:
- I added two labels, “evening” and “early-am”. These would indicate which tasks I'd do after dinner but before midnight (evening) and after midnight (early-am).
- I added a filter called “nighttime” that shows the tasks with either of these two labels (the filter statement is “@evening | @early-am”).
- Any tasks that I'm realistically going to be doing late at night are labeled with “early-am” and are set to be due a day later than if I were a morning person.
I took a screenshot of my “nighttime” filter at 12:38 am Tuesday morning, so past midnight.
I go into the office three days a week starting Tuesday.
A morning person would have a recurring task for “Pack up computers” set to recur each Monday (the night before).
Not me. My recurring task “Pack up computers” has a label of early-am and a recurrence of “every tue”, so every Tuesday. This has the beauty that it's exactly when I usually do the task, which is before I go to bed, but after midnight.
Likewise, a morning person would have a “Pack lunch” tasks set to recur each Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the nights before they go into work.
My task “Pack lunch” has an “early-am” label and recurrence of “every tue, wed, thu” which are the days I go into the office.
This also works if I actually get to bed at a reasonable hour
Just because I attach an “early-am” label to a task doesn't mean that I have to complete it then.
If I get the task done before midnight, then I just check it off like normal, and the next recurrence will show up when it's supposed to. Plus, I get the satisfaction of working ahead on tomorrow's tasks! 🙂
To get a reasonable view of all of my tasks I use the “Upcoming” view rather than the “Today” view. With the Upcoming view I can see both today's and tomorrow's tasks, and visually pick out the early-am tasks on the next day.
Until I become a morning person, this will work
I'm just happy that I found a way to use Todoist as a late-night person, unencumbered by the change of days at midnight. Even if I never get used to getting up early, this will work for me.