The soonest deadline is not always the first one to start
Sorting by date is easy enough to do in your head. What is harder is that the ordering by due date and the ordering by when work has to begin are different lists, and the second one is the one that matters.
A renewal due in ten days that takes an afternoon is not urgent. A filing due in three weeks that needs a document another office issues in ten working days is already late. The table shows both numbers side by side for exactly this reason: calendar days tell you when it is due, working days tell you how much room you actually have.
Why the working-day column keeps shrinking
Every week takes two days out. A holiday takes another. Across a month, "thirty days" is typically twenty working days, and across a holiday stretch it can drop to sixteen. That is a quarter of the time gone in a period where everyone is assuming there is slack.
Sundays always come out. Saturdays come out by default and can be switched back on for anything that runs six days. US federal holidays are optional and computed from the rules — the fixed dates plus the floating Mondays and the fourth Thursday in November — with the observance shift applied, so a July 4 falling on a Saturday is removed on the Friday.
That list is federal and nothing more. States keep their own holidays, courts and banks have their own calendars, and many employers swap federal days for floating ones. Anything that closes your office and is not on the federal list goes in the box for your own days, and comes out on top of everything else.
Reminders at seven, three and one
A single reminder the day before is worse than none, because it arrives with just enough time to discover that the thing you needed takes three days to obtain. Three reminders do different jobs.
At seven days out you establish what is actually required — which form, whose signature, what it costs. At three days you assemble it. At one day you confirm it went. Most missed deadlines are failures of the first of those, not the last.
Reminder dates falling on a weekend or holiday are flagged in the table. Move those to the working day before; a reminder nobody can act on is a reminder that gets dismissed.
Reading the list as of some other day
The as-of date defaults to today but is editable, which is more useful than it first sounds. Set it to the Monday you get back from a week off and the list tells you what will be urgent when you return rather than what is urgent now. Set it forward a month and you can see which items will have moved into the urgent band by then.
Getting it out of the browser
Two buttons sit under the results. One copies the sorted list as plain text for a message or a note. The other opens a one-page printable table with a blank tick column, which is a better artifact than it sounds — a sheet on the wall with things crossed off gets looked at, and a browser tab does not.
Related pages
For a single date rather than a list, the D-Day Calculator gives a countdown with the same working-day treatment. To break one deadline into stages and find the day work has to begin, use the Deadline Backward Schedule. To generate a run of recurring dates to paste in here, the Date List Generator does that.
Questions people ask
What date formats are accepted in the list?
MM/DD/YYYY and YYYY-MM-DD, with slashes, dashes or dots as separators. The date must be at the start of the line; whatever follows becomes the description, and leading punctuation such as a colon or dash is trimmed off it.
Does the working-day count include the due date itself?
Yes. It counts from the day after the as-of date through the due date. That is correct when the deadline is the last day you can act. If the work must be complete the day before, subtract one.
Are the holidays in here the ones my office observes?
Only if your office follows the federal calendar exactly, which many do not. The computed list is the eleven federal holidays with weekend observance. State holidays, bank closures, company shutdowns and floating days all need to go in the box for your own non-working days.
What if a line has no description?
It is kept and labelled "(no description)". Lines with no readable date at the start are skipped, and the count of skipped lines is reported under the results rather than silently ignored.