· 1 min read
What overdue should look like
Red is a design decision, not a fact about your task.
Drift
An overdue task is usually rendered red, bold, counted and sorted to the top. Four separate decisions, each defensible on its own, that together produce a screen most people close.
What we do instead
An old task sits where it always sat, in the same weight as everything else, with a small date. It is not counted anywhere. If you want to see how long something has been sitting there you can, but nothing volunteers it.
The result
People open the app on days they would previously have avoided it — which is the only metric that actually matters here, because a planner you avoid is not a planner.