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Setting a date

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Some tasks will need to be started on a particular day. IKog provides a simple means for doing that as well.  To assign a date to a task, simply embed the date in the task, preceding the date with the characters :d.  All dates are entered in the ISO date format of YYYY-MM-DD.  So to set a task to occur on a particular day we can enter.

 

>>>Take the cat to the vet :d2006-08-30

 

Once a task has been set to start on a particular date, its priority is handled slightly differently.  On any day prior to the assigned date, the task is treated as having a priority of 0. After all, until the date arrives you are not going to do anything with it, and it is treated as unimportant. Once the date arrives, the task's priority is increased by 11, making it the most important of your tasks - you said it had to be done on that day so iKog is going to put it to the top of your list.

 

There are some short cuts for adding dates that can make adding them even quicker.  If you omit the year or the month and year, they automatically default to the year or month when you entered the task.  So assuming that today's date is 2006-08-05, the following entries would all achieve the same thing.

 

>>> Take the cat to the vet :d2006-08-30

 

>>> Take the cat to the vet :d08-30

 

>>> Take the cat to the vet :d30

 

 

from version 1.59

Another shortcut for entering dates is the :d+X format.  This creates a date equal to today's date + X days. So :d+1 would be tomorrow.

from version 1.73

If you only enter the day, eg. :d21, the program automatically assumes that you want this to be a day in the future.  So if today's date is 2006-08-21, then entering :d5 will result in an actual date of 2006-09-05.  This may be helpful if trying to simulate the GTD technique of a tickler file.  If the resulting date is invalid, e.g. 2006-04-31 the date will be adjusted to the earliest valid date, in this case 2006-04-30.

Although the ISO format uses - as the separator, ikog.py is a little more flexible and allows -, / or even : to be used.  So again we could have entered the task as:

 

>>> Take the cat to the vet :d2006/08/30

 

>>> Take the cat to the vet :d2006:08:30

 

You can only assign one date to a task.  If you assign more than one, only the last date will be used.