Communicating deadlines is currently very hard and we use a myriad of workarounds where none seem right.

So the root problem is communicating Task deadline to the task owner / team assigned to a task.

Things we tried:

1. custom optional field in Maniphest

"companycustom:duedate": {
  "name": "Due Date",
  "type": "date",
  "caption": "Task due date",
  "required": false
}

Pros:

• straightforward
• lightweight

Cons:

• no search and high level overview on deadlines
• cannot customize workboard items to show the custom fields on the preview - T4863

2. countdown event

We embed those in task description with Cxx syntax (with previous creation of the countdown itself)

Pros:

• can see all the deadlines in one place and filter them out

Cons:

• very bulky creation
• it's stress inducing to see that clock ticking :D

3. calendar entries

Create calendar entries and attach project tags to them, and embed them as well to the task via Exx syntax.

Pros and cons are a bit of mix between 1 and 2.

Milestone subprojects + Countdown are great to communicate high level goals, ie. some 3 month target we're trying to hit but this is on a single task level thingy.

I know that this has been discussed a lot and there are some solutions which partially fix the problem but none provide the flexibility and a nice UX for the one creating the task and for the owner to see their deadlines, etc.

It seems that T4863 might be the solution to some of these problems (easier visibility of due dates on tasks), but after it, the problem remains of not being able to query the task in the phabricator interface by custom field (#no 1 option in this list).