In my workflow I make heavy use of the start_date to organize my many tasks. Each morning I look through the list of tasks and identify the 20-30 tasks I'll work on that day, and postpone the rest to future days.
However, currently gtg does not give visibility into the quantity of tasks scheduled on future days. So for instance, if I already have 30 tasks that will start tomorrow, I don't want to add another 10, so if I could see this somehow, and see that Friday has only 5 tasks scheduled, I could postpone to that day instead.
I'm not sure what the best way to do this visualization though. A few ideas spring to mind. First idea: There could be a simple bar chart which can be displayed in a tab where the closed task pane is now, which shows # closed tasks for the past week, and # task starting for the upcoming week. Second idea: A ribbon atop the screen sort of like f-spot shows # tasks each day for the next week. Third idea: Buttons to the right of the 'Work View' button for each day of the week which also include the number of tasks starting that day (and click on the buttons to see what tasks are scheduled).
The third idea is probably the ugliest but also the easiest implement and most functional. The ribbon is probably prettiest but may be a considerable amount of work to do. The second idea fits closely to some stuff I'm working on currently and what I'll probably end up doing for myself, if no one else has feedback on the other ideas.
I'm envisioning this would be something for the scheduling plugin. An average user with only modest numbers of tasks would likely not be interested in this.