Do It Tomorrow and Managing Up: What to Say When You Defer a Request

What each one is actually for

Do It Tomorrow

You decide, the night before or first thing in the morning, exactly what you're doing that day, and you write it down as a closed list - meaning nothing gets added to it once the day starts. When something new comes in during the day, whatever it is, it goes onto tomorrow's list instead. You don't do it today just because it arrived today. The only thing that jumps the line is a genuine emergency - something that will cause real damage if it waits until tomorrow, which turns out to be rare once you actually apply the test honestly. Everything else, including things that feel urgent because someone asked for them directly, waits its turn on a list you'll look at tomorrow morning.

Managing Up

Every request that breaks a day arrived through a person, and a disproportionate number of them arrive from above. Managing up is the practice of shaping that traffic on purpose rather than absorbing whatever lands: you work out what your manager is genuinely on the hook for this quarter, you agree with them in advance which handful of things truly cannot move, and you send them information about everything else before they have to chase you for it. What that buys you here is the right to move a task without it reading as a refusal. A manager who has already seen what today holds, and who has already agreed which single item is undroppable, can be told 'that goes on tomorrow's list, and here is the thing it would displace today' and will hear a plan being executed. A manager who has never been shown the list hears a no, delivered by someone who apparently decides for themselves what is urgent. Almost all of the practice is small acts of visibility performed in advance, and their entire function is to make your later decisions legible instead of defensive.

What you get out of pairing them

Do It Tomorrow's payoff is that today's plan survives contact with a normal day - without it, a to-do list quietly turns into whatever showed up loudest, and the things you actually meant to finish get pushed later every single day because something else always seems more pressing right now. Deferring almost everything to a list you'll see tomorrow means today's three real priorities actually get the time you set aside for them. Managing up's payoff is trust that doesn't depend on your manager watching closely - a manager who gets regular, honest updates stops needing to check in, stops assuming the worst about a quiet stretch, and gives you more room to make judgment calls on your own, because they've already seen enough of your thinking to trust the calls you make when they're not looking.

What Do It Tomorrow rests on

• Implementation intention closes intention action gap randomised trials
  Pre-committing to a specific situational cue paired with a specific response lets the behavior fire automatically when the cue occurs, without depending on in-the-moment willpower.
• Closed lists reduce overwhelm practitioner report
  A fixed bounded list of tasks rather than an ever-growing open list reduces the felt overwhelm of an infinite to-do list.
• Deferred capture protects commitment practitioner report
  Writing newly arriving tasks onto tomorrow's list rather than acting on them immediately protects today's already-committed plan from being derailed by reactivity.

What Managing Up rests on

• Perspective taking expands frame randomised trials
  Deliberately adopting a vantage point other than one's own default view widens the range of interpretations or options available for a situation.
• Adapting to anothers style improves collaboration observational studies
  Matching communication frequency and format to a manager's stated preferences produces smoother collaboration than expecting them to adapt to yours.
• Proactive disclosure builds trust observational studies
  Volunteering relevant information and progress updates before being asked builds a manager's trust and reduces their need to monitor closely.

Where they actually meet

Both practices replace a decision made in the anxious moment with a decision made ahead of time, out loud. Do It Tomorrow decides in advance which list any new task goes on, so the question 'should I drop what I'm doing for this' doesn't have to get answered under pressure - the rule already answered it. Managing up decides in advance how and when you'll surface information to your manager, so 'should I tell them now or wait' isn't a fresh judgment call every time either - you've already agreed, implicitly or explicitly, on the rhythm. Where they meet is the one moment neither practice covers on its own: a request from the specific person managing up is meant to serve, arriving in the exact form Do It Tomorrow is built to defer.

The principle underneath both

A rule decided in advance, on a calm day, holds up better than a judgment made in the pressured moment a request actually arrives - true of what you'll work on today, and just as true of how you'll communicate with the person who can most affect how your work gets judged. Both practices are, underneath the different subject matter, the same bet: that deciding the response ahead of time beats deciding it live, under the pressure of someone waiting for an answer right now.

What that makes the real goal

If a decision made in advance beats one made under pressure, then what both practices are actually protecting is a plan - today's committed list of work, or the ongoing read your manager has of you - from being silently overwritten by whatever feels most urgent in the moment it shows up. The goal in both cases is the same: keep a considered plan in charge, instead of letting it quietly get replaced by reactivity, one request at a time, without anyone ever deciding that it should.

Other practices that serve the same goal

The capture-and-clarify workflow inside David Allen's Getting Things Done system chases a similar target for the task-list side - everything that arrives gets written down and processed later rather than acted on the instant it lands - though its evidence is mostly practitioner-reported rather than experimentally tested. On the relationship side, some workplace researchers, including Gloria Mark's work on interruption and task-switching, have documented the real cost of unplanned context-switches on both output and stress, which is the same cost managing up's proactive-update habit is trying to head off before it happens. Stephen Covey's older distinction between what's urgent and what's actually important, from decades before either of these named practices existed, is the shared ancestor of both routes - a plan protected from urgency, rather than run by it.

A tradition that already does this

Covey's own writing already argued for both halves of this separately, years before either had this page's name for it: protect time for what's important rather than what's merely urgent, and proactively shape what other people expect of you rather than reacting to their demands after the fact - what he called operating inside your own circle of influence instead of waiting to be acted upon. Do It Tomorrow's closed list and managing up's proactive updates are, in effect, two specific operational answers to that older, broader instruction, one aimed at your own task list and one aimed at your manager's expectations.

Telling Your Manager the Rule Before You Ever Have to Use It

The concrete move: before a request from your manager ever gets deferred, tell them the rule exists. A short line in a regular check-in - 'anything that lands after about 3pm typically goes on the next day's list unless it's genuinely urgent, just flag it if something needs to jump the queue' - turns a private discipline into an agreed norm. Then, when their actual request does land late in the day and goes onto tomorrow's list instead of today's, it isn't a surprise decision you made unilaterally about their priorities. It's the rule they already know about, being applied the way you said it would be. The list still protects today's plan; the difference is that your manager isn't left wondering why their message went quiet.

Using a Daily Note to Make the Closed List Visible

A short daily note to your manager - three lines, what's on today's closed list and what's already been moved to tomorrow's - does double duty. It's exactly the proactive update managing up asks for, and it makes the Do It Tomorrow discipline itself visible rather than invisible, which matters because a manager who can't see the list has no way to distinguish 'this person is disciplined about focus' from 'this person is unresponsive.' Sending the note before they have to ask what happened to their request means that by the time anything of theirs lands on tomorrow's list instead of today's, they've already seen the pattern enough times to recognize it as a system, not a dodge.

4:47 on Thursday, One Slack Message

It's 4:47, you're most of the way through the last thing on today's closed list, and your manager Slacks: 'can you get me the Q3 numbers by end of day?' Old instinct: drop what you're doing, because it's your manager and it feels urgent by definition. Instead, you check the actual test - will real damage happen if this waits until tomorrow morning - and the honest answer is no, nothing's presenting the numbers before tomorrow afternoon anyway. You reply immediately, not with silence: 'on it first thing tomorrow, want it before or after the 10am?' The request goes onto tomorrow's list exactly the way any other new task would. But because you said something, in real time, your manager isn't left guessing whether you saw the message or are ignoring it - they have an answer and a time, and today's list finishes the way you planned it.

When this is worth reaching for

The day gets derailed by manager-originated requests more than by anything else, and the relationship with that manager has enough room in it to negotiate norms about response time - a reasonably secure, reasonably trusting working relationship, not one where any deferral, however well communicated, gets read badly regardless of what you say.

Where this does not apply

If your manager reads any deferral as a problem no matter how it's communicated - a genuinely rigid or insecure boss who wants same-moment responsiveness as a matter of control rather than need - explaining the rule in advance may not change the outcome, and pushing the Do It Tomorrow discipline against that reality can cost you more politically than it saves you in focus. And if the role itself is built around same-day responsiveness by design - a support desk, an on-call function, anything where the job is to respond in real time - Do It Tomorrow's core discipline doesn't fit the role at all, and no amount of managing up changes that; the fix there is a different structure, not better communication about this one.

What the evidence does and does not support

The mechanism behind Do It Tomorrow's closed list overlaps heavily with implementation intentions, a well-studied idea from psychologist Peter Gollwitzer where pre-committing to a specific if-this-then-that plan measurably improves follow-through compared to deciding in the moment - one of the more consistently replicated findings in this area of psychology, even though Forster's specific list-based method hasn't itself been run through controlled trials. Managing up's evidence is thinner and more indirect: workplace studies on interruption cost and on how proactive communication affects a manager's trust in a report are mostly observational, describing patterns across many workplaces rather than testing the specific advice as an intervention. Whether explicitly telling a manager about a deferral rule changes how they react to it, as opposed to just generally maintaining good communication, hasn't been tested directly - it's a reasonable extension of the trust research, not a finding of its own.