I was listening to a podcast and the broadcaster admonished his listeners to avoid kicking the can regarding responsibilities. He was pointing out that deferring an action to an indefinite future was a really bad idea. That got me thinking about times when it might be OK to kick the can with my personal responsibilities.

There are some tasks that are on my list of things to do, but circumstances make them unreasonable to do right now. Here in central-Kansas our temperatures during the summer regularly reach over 100F (that’s nearly 38C)! While there are some outside tasks I can’t avoid, there are others that are best left for cooler parts of the year. Sometime back in the cold of winter I realized that we were going to need to clean our gutters at Hectic Manor, and I put that on the calendar for the first week of August. It was probably below zero (both Fahrenheit and Celsius) at the time, and I was most likely in a cold-induced catatonic state. That’s the only reasoning that I can come up with that I would’ve ever put clean the gutters onto the calendar for the hottest month of the year. So I’m going to kick the can until the Fall (which in Kansas lasts about four days in late September). Hopefully we won’t be raining every day so the work won’t be wet and it certainly won’t be as hot as when it was initially scheduled.

That’s one instance where kicking the can is reasonable.

Lots of other tasks pop up in my Todoist task manager and I decide to defer them until a later time. For the most part, I defer them a few days or weeks, but the deferment is to a specific timeframe.

Where I sometimes get myself in trouble is deferring a task several times, and then deciding that maybe it’s not something I’m really going to do. I’ve gotten into the habit of removing the dates from the task and just letting languish in my Todoist in dateless purgatory. What’s supposed to happen is I’m supposed to review my projects on a regular basis and either return those items to a reasonable timeframe on my schedule…or recognize that they’re never going to get done.

But the trouble occurs because my review keeps falling into the supposed to category instead of the done category. It’s almost as if I kick the can on the weekly review! I hadn’t really thought of that until I was writing this post. This means that I’ve got lots and lots of tasks that are hanging around in my Todoist without dates assigned, and honestly they seldom get looked at. I’ve got to get better at looking at those tasks that are associated with a particular day’s theme and putting some of them on the list for that day. Then I would start making progress on those things that were important enough to put into my task manager. That’s something that I’m going to start working on right away.

So here’s an action item for you. Think about those things that you are on your list of things to do. Then answer these four questions:

• Should I be doing this task at all?
• Should I be doing this task now?
• Should I kick the can on some items to a definite time, later in the year?
• Or should I abandon this task altogether?

While we think we can do it all, let’s face facts that some things are going to have to give if we really want to get the important things done!