There’s one task type worth its own section, because it was there at the very beginning of my story, back with that first overwhelmed text file: the things you’re waiting on from other people.

You send a report to a colleague for review. You ask a vendor for a quote. You delegate something to a teammate. The ball is in their court, but you can’t afford to trust that it’ll bounce back on its own, because when it doesn’t, it’s your problem. So you keep a shadow of it in your system, and this is where several facets combine into something genuinely useful.

You record who you’re waiting on, I use a tag with their name, so I can pull up “everything I’m waiting on from Sam” before a meeting with Sam. You set a start date for when you’ll next follow-up with them, far enough out to give them a fair chance, so the task goes quiet and doesn’t nag you in the meantime. And you add a real due date only if the thing is genuinely time-sensitive. Then you can forget about it, because the system won’t. On the follow-up date, it resurfaces, and you nudge them. One task, three facets working together, name, start date, due date, turning a thing you’d otherwise drop into a thing that chases itself back to you at the right moment.