The four axes of attention.

Most deadline tools collapse the mechanics. They give you a Status (todo / doing / done) and call it complete. Or a priority (high / medium / low) and call it complete. Or both, with the understanding that you are supposed to manage your attention by toggling between them.

This collapses information that needs to stay separate.

A deadline carries one piece of underlying fact: its date. Everything else you do to a deadline is one of four operations on a separate axis. Most tools mush two or three of these into one mechanic. Deadlinewatch keeps them apart. The shape thesis sits behind why I kept them separate.

Status. Am I working on this?

Status is the workflow axis. It answers where this sits in the lifecycle of getting done.

Three states. Active, completed, inactive. No kanban-of-self. No “in review,” no “blocked,” no “on hold,” no “awaiting feedback.” Those are notes about a deadline, not states of attention. The mental model in practice is binary. Am I dealing with this, or am I done? The two terminal states (completed vs. inactive) only distinguish “I did it” from “it stopped being real,” because that distinction is useful in retrospect.

Snooze. Do I want to see this right now?

Snooze is the temporal visibility axis. It answers whether this deadline should take up space in my field of attention today.

Snooze does not touch the date. The deadline is still due when it is due. The user has only said to hide this from view until a chosen day. After the wake date, the row returns to full weight automatically.

Snoozed deadlines remain visible as faded ghost rows in their natural section, with a chip reading “Snoozed until Thursday” replacing the actions row. The earlier version of Snooze hid rows entirely. That turned out to be unsafe. Users would defer something, forget the wake date, and lose the deadline. The ghost view is the safe answer. Out of mind, but not out of sight.

Pin. Does this matter more than the others today?

Pin is the in-interface attention axis. It answers where this deadline should appear inside the dashboard.

Pinning a deadline due in sixty days hauls it to the top of the dashboard. The sixty days don’t change. The user is saying this matters to them beyond what chronology would put it at. Maybe the deadline is small but consequential. Maybe it is the only thing they care about this week. Maybe it is an anchor for everything else.

Pin is binary. Either a deadline is Pinned or it isn’t. An earlier graded importance field (high / normal / low) sat on the tool for months before I retired it. Users either flagged something as high, or they left it alone. The three-state dropdown was actually a two-state field pretending to be three. Pin is the honest version.

Poke. Should this find me when I’m not looking?

Poke is the external attention axis. It answers whether an email should land in my inbox when this deadline is N days away.

Default: off. Most deadlines never email. The dashboard is the surface. Users who look at the dashboard see everything they need to see. Mass email reminders dilute the value of each one. When every deadline triggers an email, the inbox becomes wallpaper and the user develops banner-blindness toward the reminders.

Poke is a deliberate user act. This deadline matters enough that I want a backup outside the interface. Cadence is global (set once in settings) and fires at seven days, three days, one day, or on the day. Per-deadline cadence override was explicitly rejected as too granular. The binary toggle carries the meaning, the global cadence carries the schedule.

Poke has a quieter cousin, the browser Pop-up. Set per deadline for one day, three days, or a week ahead, it surfaces on screen while you have the tool open in a tab. It answers the same question. The email finds you anywhere. The Pop-up finds you while you work. Both stay off until you ask.

Why four, why these four

The axes are independent. A deadline can be active and not Snoozed and Pinned and Poked, or any combination. The combination space is large because the axes carry different information. Collapsing any two of them into one mechanic destroys information.

Pin and Snooze are siblings in opposite directions on the same axis (in-interface visibility). Pin says “louder than chronology dictates.” Snooze says “quieter than chronology dictates.” Same kind of operation, opposite directions. Symmetry is a design tell. When the mechanics rhyme, the user’s mental model holds together. They don’t need to memorize disparate rules.

Pin and Poke are siblings on the matters-more axis. Pin = matters more inside the interface (top of the dashboard). Poke = matters more outside the interface (email reminders). Both binary. Both default off. Both deliberate.

The four-axis frame is the closest thing the product has to a load-bearing design idea. Everything else, the views, the assistant, the streams, exists to render what these four axes describe. ( On the related question of why none of the axes feeds a hidden priority score. )