Relative Date Formats

I used Remember The Milk for year before switching to Dynalist.

Like Dynalist, almost all metadata associated with a task can be entered directly from the keyboard for example !2 sets the task to priority two #groceries adds the task to a list or tag etc…

Remember the milk also has a way to set start and end dates using code code like ^2020-09-01. However, one feature I really liked was the ability to enter relative date descriptions into this.

Here are the supported date and time format.s
https://www.rememberthemilk.com/help/answer/basics-basics-dateformat

This was nice as often I know I want to follow up on something in a couple weeks, but I don’t know exactly what date that would be. So in remember the milk I could just type ^2 weeks, and it would figure out the date for me.

I propose that a similar system be added to the date feature of Dynalist where when you enter specific ! codes they will be immediately converted into the correct date.

For example here’s some format ideas:

!today or !tod: Today
!tommrow or !tom: Tomorrow
!friday or !fri: Next Friday
!2friday or !2fri: The friday after next
!5hr: In 5 hours
!5days: In 5 days

!2months: In 2 months
!15th : The 15th of the current month

I don’t know if I would use this much, but this could also allow for negative relative dates like this

!yesterday or !-1day: Yesterday
!-friday or !-fri: Last Friday
!-3weeks: 3 weeks ago

What you can do that almost achieves the same thing, is type ! and then use the cursor keys to get your relative date. Left is yesterday. Right is tomorrow. Right twice is 2 days. Down twice is in two weeks, and if you want Friday, just scroll to the Friday.

3 Likes

I figured this out using a text expander

Oh wow Alan…I did not realize the arrow key trick. That’s actually super useful.