I don’t actually have a genius idea, though I’ve been mulling it over!
I’ve been pondering whether something like the scheme @zedmango suggested for me and my book blanket (looks for link aha, in my thread about it) would work for doing to-dos ahead of schedule. They’d have to be the most important to-do of the moment, and one at a time, I think. Once I schedule in a to-do, add a datapoint of however many days I want. Say, I need it completed in seven days, so I add a datapoint of 6 (“pithy name for task” in the comment). Once that’s in, I can’t add any more data until the task is finished. Once it is, +1 (“for being caught up”) on any day when I don’t currently have a task that I need to beemind. That way I can build up buffer for being on time, lose it and derail if I’m not…
Idea needs tweaking, or test-driving, and only really works for Most Important Tasks though. I think. (Maybe some bright spark has an idea of how it can be modified for all tasks.)