The Journal
How to track tasks that depend on someone else
Some jobs on a household list are not being put off; they are waiting on a landlord, an insurer, a council or the other adult in the house. This piece sets out where to keep them, what each line has to record, and which of the deadlines people quote at landlords and banks are written down anywhere — checked against the statute, the regulator's rulebook and the Ombudsman's Code on 20 September 2026.
Stuck and blocked are different states
A job can sit on a list for a month for two reasons. A stuck job is one you could do this afternoon and have not: the next move is yours. A blocked job is one where the next move belongs to someone else. The landlord has to send a plumber, the insurer has to decide the claim, the council has to reply, or the other adult in the house has to ring their own bank, because the account is in their name.
The two look identical on paper and need opposite treatment. The research literature draws the same line: delay forced by someone else is not procrastination, as "Am I lazy or procrastinating? The difference research draws" sets out. Advice about getting started, which this site covers in "Why starting is harder than doing", does nothing here: no amount of resolve reaches into someone else's inbox. What a blocked job needs is duller — a record of who has it, since when, and the date on which you will ask again.
Nothing I could find measures what share of a household's list is blocked, so this piece gives no figure for it.
What one blocked line does to the rest of the list
A to-do list works for as long as reading it produces a decision. A blocked line produces none, yet has to be read and rejected every time. A list carrying five of them reads as a list of things that cannot be done, and the habit that follows is skimming. That is an argument from how lists get used, not a research finding.
The nearest research concerns goals, not chores. Veronika Brandstätter and Julia Schüler, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2013, studied what they call an action crisis: the phase in which someone has invested heavily in a goal, keeps meeting difficulties, and is caught between carrying on and letting go. Across two scenario experiments with students (40 and 70 participants) and two field studies, one of 114 marathon runners, people in that state weighed the goal's costs and benefits more and, in a memory test, recognised less about how to carry it out.
None of that concerns waiting for a plumber. But a repair chased three times is also invested in, repeatedly set back and half abandoned; if the finding carries over, such a line costs attention spent re-arguing whether it is worth pursuing. The practice below — decide once, date it, stop re-deciding — is reasoned from that, not tested.
Where the 'waiting for' list comes from
In David Allen's Getting Things Done method, an actionable item goes one of three ways: do it, defer it, or delegate it. The David Allen Company's workflow chart shows where the delegated branch ends — the item is "being tracked on Waiting For list / folder", apart from the reminders of your own next actions.
So the list descends from delegation: it was drawn for someone who hands work to other people. A household's blocked jobs are mostly not delegated — nobody chose to give the damp to the housing association — but the list works the same way. A colleague can be asked at the next meeting; a landlord has to be chased in writing.
Searched on 20 September 2026, PubMed returns nothing for "getting things done" AND (Allen OR GTD) AND (trial OR randomized), and nothing for the control query "getting things done" AND GTD. The bare phrase alone returns 36 records, whose titles are ordinary uses of those three English words — an editorial on critical care, an interview about TB and HIV — rather than work on the method. So the index does not carry this literature; that is not the same as no test existing, and this piece claims only that the list is a useful convention.
The three things a blocked line has to carry
Who holds it, by name. "Council" is not a holder; the department and the case reference are. For a company it is the claim or complaint reference. For the other adult in the house it is their name, and what they said they would do.
The date it became blocked. That is the date the other party was told, not the date the problem began, because every clock in the next section runs from the telling. Keep the proof with the date; Shelter England advises private renters to report repairs in writing.
The date of the next chase, and who will make it. The chase is the only part of the job that is yours, so it goes on the calendar while the line stays out of the way on its own list. In a shared household the chaser is one named person; otherwise each adult assumes the other one rang.
The clocks that do exist, and the ones that do not
Most of the deadlines people quote at landlords and companies are written down nowhere, and the few that are mostly time the answer to a complaint rather than the work. This is the position on 20 September 2026, for housing in England.
Repairs by a private landlord: no number. Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 implies, into the leases it applies to, a covenant to keep the structure, the exterior and the main installations in repair. It sets no period for doing so. The working standard is a reasonable time from your report, and Shelter England is blunt: "The law does not say how long a reasonable time is." It depends on urgency, on how vulnerable the occupants are, and on the work involved.
Repairs by a social landlord: fixed numbers, for named hazards only. Awaab's Law — the Hazards in Social Housing (Prescribed Requirements) (England) Regulations 2025 — came into force on 27 October 2025 for social landlords in England, covering emergency hazards and damp and mould presenting a significant risk of harm. An emergency hazard must be investigated and made safe within 24 hours of the landlord becoming aware of it. A potential significant hazard must be investigated within 10 working days, with a written summary to the tenant within 3 working days of the investigation concluding and safety work within 5. The guidance extends the timetable on 30 November 2026 to further hazards, among them excess cold, falls and fire.
That is not a general repairs clock: a dripping tap in a housing association flat is still a reasonable-time job. Nor does it reach private renting: the government's Renters' Rights Act roadmap of 13 November 2025 lists Awaab's Law for private landlords as to be confirmed, subject to consultation.
Complaints to a social landlord: a clock for the answer. The Housing Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code, statutory since 1 April 2024, binds landlords in the Ombudsman's scheme. A complaint must be acknowledged within 5 working days, answered at stage 1 within 10 working days of acknowledgement, and given a final stage 2 response within 20 working days of the escalation being acknowledged. What is timed is the answer, due "when the answer to the complaint is known", not when the work is finished — though the work must still be tracked. The Code's paragraph 1.2 defines a complaint as "an expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, actions or lack of action by the landlord, its own staff, or those acting on its behalf, affecting a resident or group of residents": the service itself, then, not only the handling of a request. A service request — asking for something to be put right — becomes a complaint once the resident is dissatisfied with the response.
Complaints to a bank, insurer or lender: eight weeks. Under DISP 1.6.2R in the Financial Conduct Authority's Handbook a firm must, within eight weeks of receiving a complaint, send a final response or a written explanation of why it cannot yet give one; either letter must say you may now go to the Financial Ombudsman Service. So the eight weeks time the answer, or a holding letter, not the closing of the case. Payment services and electronic money complaints run faster under DISP 1.6.2AR: 15 business days, or 35 in exceptional circumstances. Car finance commission complaints sit outside this: the rules moved repeatedly between December 2025 and July 2026, so read the FCA's motor finance pages.
How to chase, and how often is reasonable
No source I found sets a reasonable interval between chases, and this piece will not invent one. The clocks give a way to choose the date.
Where a clock exists, the chase date is the working day after it runs out, and the chase quotes it: the date of receipt, the rule, the date the response fell due. Until then the line can be left alone.
Where no clock exists, make one. Shelter's example wording for private renters puts a requested deadline and its reason into the report itself: 48 hours for a broken banister, 24 hours for no heating in cold weather. That is a request you can justify, not an entitlement you can cite, but a date nobody disputed is the nearest thing to a clock such a job has. Chase on it in writing, and log each chase.
The step that changes most is the conversion. A repair request to a social landlord has no response clock unless it engages Awaab's Law, in which case your report is the ordinary way of making the landlord aware, and that awareness starts the clock. For everything else the repair has no clock, and a complaint about how it was handled has three. With a financial firm the eight weeks run from receipt, so say in writing that you are complaining and log that date. For most blocked jobs that moment is the second chase, not the fifth. The Code obliges landlords to accept complaints referred within 12 months of the issue occurring or of the resident becoming aware of it, unless the complaint is excluded on other grounds — a reason not to let a line drift.
When to take the job back
A blocked line leaves the waiting list in one of four ways, and only one of them is the other party doing the work.
It can go up. After a social landlord's stage 2 response the route is the Housing Ombudsman; after a firm's final response, or the eight-week letter that stands in for one, it is the Financial Ombudsman Service. A final response must say where the firm stands on the Ombudsman's time limits, so read it closely. Awaab's Law duties are implied terms of a social tenancy, enforceable in court as breach of contract, though the guidance encourages the complaints route first.
It can come back, in part or whole: often a piece of the job was yours all along — the photographs, the diary of days the heating failed — and can be done while you wait. If the other adult has not rung the bank after two chases, agree a new date or say aloud that it is not going to happen; that conversation is a separate argument, and "How to talk to your partner about chores without a row" is where this site makes it.
Or it can be dropped. Brandstätter and Schüler treat persistence and disengagement as two sides of successful goal striving, and the state they study is the one in between. A small refund that has taken four chases may not be worth a fifth. Cross it off deliberately, with the date.
This is general information, not legal advice. The housing law described is the law in England, and the wording of a tenancy, a policy or a guarantee can change the answer; take the documents themselves to Shelter or Citizens Advice. Every source was checked on 20 September 2026.
Sources
- Source for the third section's account of where the list comes from. The chart runs from "Is it actionable?" through "What's the next action?" to three branches labelled Do it ("If less than 2 minutes"), Defer it and Delegate; the Delegate branch ends at the caption "In communication system and being tracked on Waiting For list / folder", and the Defer branch at "For me to do, as soon as I can (Next Action reminder lists / folders / trays)". I downloaded the PDF and read the chart as an image on 20 September 2026, because its text layer drops the branch labels. Copyright line: 2008 David Allen Company. — David Allen Company, "GTD Workflow: Clarifying and Organizing" (official workflow chart, PDF), 2008
- Source for the three PubMed counts in the third section's last paragraph. I re-ran every query at the E-utilities esearch endpoint (db=pubmed) on 20 September 2026 and read the Count element returned: "getting things done" AND (Allen OR GTD) AND (trial OR randomized) returned Count 0; the control query "getting things done" AND GTD returned Count 0; the bare phrase "getting things done" returned Count 36, query translation "getting things done"[All Fields]. I then read the result titles the same day in PubMed's own listing for that bare query: they are incidental uses of the three English words — among them an editorial on multidisciplinary critical care across specialties and an interview headed "Bern-Thomas Nyang'wa: getting things done in TB and HIV" — and none is a study of Allen's method. This repairs an earlier draft that described the bare-name search as returning nothing; it returns 36. The paragraph makes no positive claim about the method's evidence base, because no source opened here supports one. — US National Library of Medicine, PubMed E-utilities esearch (db=pubmed), searches run 20 September 2026, 2026
- Source for the second section's research paragraph and for the last paragraph of the final section. Open-access copy in the University of Konstanz repository (KOPS), which I downloaded and read on 20 September 2026. The abstract reports two experimental lab and two correlational field studies; participants in an action crisis thought about goal-related costs and benefits more intensively and frequently, and in an incidental learning task recognised more cost–benefit items and fewer implementation items than the control group. The introduction defines an action crisis as the phase in which the individual has already invested a great deal in the goal, encounters recurring difficulties and is caught between further pursuit and disengagement, and its first sentence calls persistence and disengagement two pivotal aspects of successful goal striving. Samples read in the Method sections: Study 1, forty students at a German university; Study 2, seventy students at a Swiss university (the incidental learning task); Study 4, one hundred and fourteen non-professional marathon runners reporting on kilometre 30. The authors note that the scenario studies used goals of no personal importance to participants. Nothing in the paper concerns household tasks or goals blocked by a third party; the piece labels that extension as its own inference. — Brandstätter, V., & Schüler, J., "Action crisis and cost–benefit thinking: A cognitive analysis of a goal-disengagement phase", Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(3), 543–553 (repository copy), 2013
- Source for the private-landlord paragraph of the fifth section. Section 11(1), extent-marked E+W, implies in a lease to which the section applies ("as to which, see sections 13 and 14") a covenant by the lessor to keep in repair the structure and exterior of the dwelling-house (including drains, gutters and external pipes), and to keep in repair and proper working order the installations for the supply of water, gas and electricity and for sanitation, and for space heating and heating water. I searched the revised text on 20 September 2026: it contains no period for carrying out repairs, and the phrase "reasonable time" occurs only in subsection (6), which lets the lessor enter "at reasonable times of the day" on giving 24 hours' notice in writing to view the premises. The piece confines its housing statements to England and does not describe the law in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. — Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 (c. 70), section 11 (Repairing obligations in short leases), legislation.gov.uk, 1985
- Source for the reasonable-time standard and the quotation "The law does not say how long a reasonable time is" in the fifth section, for the advice to report in writing in the fourth, and for the example deadlines in the sixth. Re-read 20 September 2026 to confirm the quotation word for word and the three things the page says a reasonable time depends on: how urgent or serious the problem is, how vulnerable the people living in the property are, and what work the landlord has to do — the fifth section now carries all three rather than two. The page also gives example wording asking for a broken banister to be fixed within 48 hours and for no heating in winter within 24 hours, and a follow-up template listing the dates of earlier contact. The companion Shelter page on landlord and tenant responsibilities, read the same day, carries the advice to keep a record of what you have told the landlord and when. Page marked last updated 26 April 2026. Shelter England is a charity's advice page, used here as a secondary source for a standard that comes from case law, which the piece does not cite directly. — Shelter England, "How long should a private landlord take to do repairs?", 2026
- Source for every Awaab's Law statement in the fourth, fifth and seventh sections. The guidance, marked "Updated 31 July 2026" and "Applies to England", states that Awaab's Law came into force for the social rented sector on 27 October 2025 for all emergency hazards and all damp and mould hazards presenting a significant risk of harm; that from 30 November 2026 it will be extended to excess cold, excess heat, falls, structural collapse, fire and explosions, electrical hazards and domestic hygiene, when the 2025 Regulations are amended by the Hazards in Social Housing (Prescribed Requirements) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2026; and gives the timeframes, of which the piece prints the first four: emergency investigation and safety work within 24 hours of becoming aware; investigation of potential significant hazards within 10 working days; written summary within 3 working days of the investigation concluding; safety work within 5 working days of the investigation concluding. It says day 1 is the day after the landlord becomes aware, except for the 24-hour emergency timeframe; that the requirements are implied into social tenancy agreements so that tenants can take legal action through the courts for breach of contract; and that tenants are encouraged to use the landlord's complaints procedure first. I also read regulation 1 of SI 2025/1042 on legislation.gov.uk: in force 27th October 2025, applying to lessors of social homes in England. The guidance lists the ways a landlord may become aware of a potential hazard, among them "a tenant raising an issue affecting their home" and someone raising it on a tenant's behalf, which is why the sixth section says a repair report engaging Awaab's Law does start a clock on the work itself. All read 20 September 2026. — Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, "Awaab's Law Phase 2: Guidance for social landlords", GOV.UK, 2026
- Source for the statement that Awaab's Law does not yet apply to private landlords. The roadmap, published 13 November 2025 and applying to England, says the government will extend Awaab's Law to the private rented sector and will consult on the details, including implementation timescales, in due course; its milestones annex lists "Implementation of Awaab's Law for the PRS" as "TBC – subject to consultation". Read 20 September 2026. A web search the same day found no regulations made under the Act for private landlords; if that changes, this paragraph is the first to update. — Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, "Implementing the Renters' Rights Act 2025: Our roadmap for reforming the Private Rented Sector", GOV.UK, 2025
- Source for the social-landlord complaint clocks in the fifth section and the 12-month point in the sixth. Re-read 20 September 2026 to repair two misstatements, both now fixed. First, the fifth section had attributed to the Code a paraphrase of paragraph 1.2 that is not in it; the definition is now quoted word for word as the Code has it — a complaint is "an expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, actions or lack of action by the landlord, its own staff, or those acting on its behalf, affecting a resident or group of residents". Second, the sixth section had printed paragraph 2.3 without its qualifier; 2.3 reads "Landlords must accept complaints referred to them within 12 months of the issue occurring or the resident becoming aware of the issue, unless they are excluded on other grounds", and the body now carries the exclusion. Also read: the Code became statutory on 1 April 2024 under the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 and applies to members of the Scheme; 1.3, a resident need not use the word 'complaint'; 1.4, a service request is a request requiring action to be taken to put something right and is not a complaint; 1.5, a complaint must be raised when the resident is dissatisfied with the response to a service request, without stopping work on the request; 6.2, acknowledged, defined and logged within 5 working days; 6.3, full stage 1 response within 10 working days of acknowledgement; 6.11 and 6.14, stage 2 acknowledged within 5 working days and final response within 20 working days of acknowledgement; 6.6 and 6.17, a response is due when the answer to the complaint is known, not when outstanding actions are completed, which must still be tracked; 6.19, the stage 2 response must give details of how to escalate to the Ombudsman Service, which carries the seventh section's first route. The piece does not print the extension limits in 6.4 and 6.15. — Housing Ombudsman Service, "Complaint Handling Code 2024", 2024
- Source for the financial-complaint clocks in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh sections. DISP 1.6.2R (version dated 12/07/2019): subject to DISP 1.6.2AR, the respondent must, by the end of eight weeks after its receipt of the complaint, send a final response or a written response that explains why it is not in a position to make a final response and indicates when it expects to; both must inform the complainant that the complaint may now be referred to the Financial Ombudsman Service, and the final response must indicate whether the respondent consents to waive the relevant time limits in DISP 2.8. DISP 1.6.2AR (13/01/2018): for an EMD or PSD complaint, a final response by the end of 15 business days after the day of receipt, or in exceptional circumstances a holding response by then and a final response by the end of 35 business days. DISP 1.6.1R (01/06/2026): a prompt written acknowledgement stating which of those timescales applies, and keeping the complainant informed thereafter. The page stated that DISP 1.6 was last updated on 01/06/2026 and showed a future version dated 25/10/2027, which I have not read. Read in the Handbook itself on 20 September 2026, and re-read the same day to confirm the point the fifth section makes about closure and compliance: limb (2) of DISP 1.6.2R is satisfied by a written response explaining why the firm is not in a position to make a final response, so the eight weeks time the answer or a holding letter, not the closure of the case. — Financial Conduct Authority, FCA Handbook, DISP 1.6 (Complaints time limit rules), 2026
- Source for the car finance carve-out in the fifth section, which now says only that the rules moved repeatedly between December 2025 and July 2026 and sends the reader to the FCA. Re-read 20 September 2026; the page and its update notes record four dated moves in that window: 03/12/2025, a further extension (PS25/18) to the time firms have to send final responses to motor finance commission complaints; 30/03/2026, the redress scheme introduced by PS26/3; 01/05/2026, the scheme legally challenged; 02/07/2026, the Upper Tribunal suspending parts of the scheme on agreed terms, with firms required to comply with all rules not suspended. First published 29/03/2026, last updated 03/07/2026. Because the position is moving, the piece gives no dates or deadlines for these complaints. — Financial Conduct Authority, "PS26/3: Motor finance consumer redress scheme", 2026
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