Set Deadlines for All Milestones but not All Tasks

 Is more better? Maybe. Adding deadlines to tasks in addition to milestones MAY be good to do in some cases. In general, add deadlines to regular tasks only IF there's a need

Use deadlines sparingly

There are very strong reasons for following this rule: Add deadlines for ALL milestone tasks (see Deadlines for Milestones). But I don't really have a strong reason for following this rule: Add deadlines only IF needed for non-milestone tasks.

My philosophy here is one of simplicity. Adding deadlines for milestones is trivial and easy to manage since there are typically only 5-7 milestones. But adding deadlines for non-milestone tasks takes more time since there are hundreds of line items in my typical multi-million dollar, 6-12 month projects. Besides, milestones with deadlines with the correct set of predecessors will automatically identify the non-milestone tasks in the critical path.

However, there have been times when I have specified deadlines for tasks. This would be when a task had a resource constraint: e.g., project members were going to be on vacation and would not be available to support a vendor with testing and training. The key tasks weren't major enough to be turned into a milestone since it didn't mark the end of a major phase. Since I had a real deadline on this task, I specified a deadline on a non-milestone task. And thus tasks in the critical path for that key task would turn red if anything slipped (even if the milestone itself was not impacted).

Bottom line: Specify deadlines for non-milestone tasks only IF necessary