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A ZARMS card has two deadlines: Starts and Due. Starts isn’t “the day I plan to begin.” It’s the deadline to start work. If a card is still Not started when Starts passes, the card becomes overdue.

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A due date alone tells you too late

For most work, people set when it must be finished, but not when it must be started. As a result, right before the deadline they find out “this takes longer than I thought” or “this is harder than expected,” and they miss it. If you’ve estimated how long the work takes, you know when you need to start to finish on time. If that day passes and you still haven’t started, that’s a warning sign you need to know about: “This is at risk.” ZARMS treats a missed start as overdue so you don’t miss that sign.

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When a card becomes overdue

Whoever has the ball gets a daily email listing cards that are due soon or overdue.

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How to set Starts

Work backward from Due by the time the work takes. For example, if Due is Friday at 6:00 PM, the work takes about two days, and you want half a day for review, set Starts to Wednesday morning. If you enter your estimate in Hours (planned), you can later compare it with the actual time and see how accurate your estimates are (Look back with Insights).

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See what’s ahead on the timeline

When Starts and Due are set, the timeline shows a bar from the start deadline to the due date. You can see whose work overlaps and when, so you spot unrealistic plans early. If entering dates every time is a hassle, set default dates for new cards to match the board’s work (Change board settings). To create several cards from meeting notes at once, you can also have AI draft them.
Last modified on November 4, 2026