"It's not urgent"

The renewal isn't until the twentieth. The trip is after half term. Nobody's chasing. There's no reason to do it now.

Steel's review put deadline distance next to unpleasantness as the two things about a task that most predict its being put off. The further away the deadline, the more the delay. That's not a character flaw. It's how anyone relates to a date that's three weeks off. But look at what it means for the heap. Every item enters the heap when it's not urgent, because that's when it arrives. It sits there while it's not urgent. And then it's urgent, and it gets done in a rush, late, with a fine or a lapse or a child without a place on the trip, or it gets done the night before with the fourth reminder open in another tab. Not urgent isn't a reason to wait. It's the description of the only time the item is cheap.

Consider what urgency actually is. It's a property the heap manufactures. The form wasn't urgent when it arrived, and you didn't do it, so it became urgent, and the urgency is now the only thing that gets it done. You've built a system in which nothing gets done until it's an emergency, and then wondered why your admin feels like a series of emergencies. The item didn't change. The date got closer, and the date getting closer is the one thing that was always going to happen.

There's also a cost to doing things at the urgent end that isn't the fine. It's the choice you've lost. The insurance done three weeks early can be shopped around. The insurance done on the nineteenth takes whatever price is on the screen. The dentist rung in September gets an appointment in October. Rung when the tooth hurts, it gets whatever's left. Not urgent means you have options, and urgent means you don't, and the heap converts the first into the second at a rate of one item a day.

The rule in chapter 20 is do it when it arrives, and the objection to that is that it isn't urgent, and the answer is that not urgent is the point. You're doing it while it's small and cheap and you've got a choice about how. The alternative isn't doing it later. It's doing it later under conditions you didn't choose, and paying for the difference.