By âsoftâ dates I mean 2021-03-01 as opposed to âhardâ dates !(2021-03-01). I would like to use the date picker to insert a soft date. I mostly use hard dates to indicate a due date, and soft dates to document calls, meetings, etc. When I search for due or overdue, I donât want the items with soft dates to show up.
The datepicker could be invoked with the normal â!â but then have a button on the datepicker to produce a soft date. This would also make it easy to convert an existing hard date to a soft date (click on hard date, datepicker pops up, click soft date button, click done)
I donât understand why the distinction is needed though. You can treat items with both checkboxes and dates as âhard datesâ I guess? You can search for them that way.
In my system, this means I am waiting (yellow tag #wa) for a call back from Joe Blow. I called him on 3/1, and if I donât hear back I should call him again on 3/15. So If I search for due or overdue on 3/7, I donât want this item to be in the search results. If I used a âhardâ date for 3/1, this would show up in the search results.
Maybe I need to re-think my system. Open to suggestions
Youâre thinking of hard dates and soft dates but there are many ways to think about this. You can de-tangle the two ideas as dates, and #soft tags. Then, search for the dates and explicity exclude #soft, and bookmark that query.
Thanks, I get that. But if in my example 03/01 was a hard date with a #soft tag, I would be unable to return this item in a search that targets 03/15. Also, the #soft tag requires much more keyboarding than my proposed solution.
the #soft tag requires much more keyboarding than my proposed solution
Then shorten it. Use #s. Or just s. Or anything unique on your keyboard. Any token that the search operators can latch onto will work.
2021-03-01 as opposed to âhardâ dates !(2021-03-01)
To be honest, I donât follow what youâre saying here. Iâm assuming you want a button in the date picker to toggle soft/hard. But in all my years of Getting Things Doneâ˘ď¸/BuJo/Productivity Tools/accounts on every startups website, Iâve never heard those terms. Seems to be unique to your system. Iâm not a fan of software adding more then the minimum necessary functionality set to a function, when two separate functions can accomplish the same thing. Identifiers to filter search results, and dates, shouldnât be tangled together imo.
I understand the request, if itâs to improve the usability of the insertion of dates with the date picker when you donât want the result to be treated as a date (2021-03-01 is just text) but I donât understand what your use case is in your search: is 2021-03-01 ever useful to search for? Do you ever need to find out what you did (call Joe) on a particular date?
If itâs just the ability to select and insert a date and you donât need to search for it, personally I would use the â!â to call up the date picker, then delete the â!â after itâs inserted
So I guess Iâm having a hard time explaining my use case. Let me try again: I want to have more than one date in a single item, but I want my search to target only one of those dates. I used âhardâ and âsoftâ to indicate dates that could be targeted vs those that should be ignored.
With all due respect, I do not believe the Dynalist search operators can handle this, or I am missing much of their power. Consider the following items with the #soft tag as recommended:
The first {#soft date} is intended to be some reference date, the second date is due date. If I search for due or overdue with until:0d, all three items are returned, including the first which is not yet due. If I try to eliminate the reference date in the search with until:0d -#soft, none of the items are returned, even though two are due or overdue. If I wanted to target the #soft date in a search, I would have the same difficulty. I donât see how some sort of OR statement would get the job done. In short, in an item with two dates, you cannot search for one and ignore the other. That is, unless one of the dates is a text string. Which leads to my original request, which would be an easier solution than inserting a date and then going back to delete the ! and enclosing parentheses.
Have you considered adding a child item with your second date?
As Iâm sure youâve realised #soft in your examples isnât tied at all to either date, but if you had one of the dates as a child item you could tag and search appropriately
Thanks all for forcing me to explore my own use case more thoroughly. I think @Stuart_Gibbons has the best solution with a tagged child. @Erica I withdraw my feature request, and thanks for providing this forum!
Iâm curious, is there a reason you have to keep your soft overdue day on the list? From the two examples you provide, if you remove the soft overdue day right away (Alt + mouse click), you wonât have any of the search problems you mention and you wonât even need to use the tag for it. I used multiple days on my list many times, but I never keep my overdue start/soft day , I either change it to today (if I really want to start working on it right away), reschedule it for the future, or just delete it.
I still donât get what âsoft dateâ aka âreference dateâ aka âdates that should be ignoredâ means. What use are they? For example if the soft date is a week after the hard date, and the hard date passes, does the soft date become the hard date? In that case, isnât it the same as a repeating date that got checked off?
Specific to my system only, itâs a date that memorializes a meeting, call, email, etc. Itâs not something I would search for unless I was trying to figure out âwhat did I do on this date?â Which I donât do. The dates I search for are start dates and due dates.
Thatâs how I would use âsoftâ or text dates, others may have different uses. As has been clarified here, a soft date is needed only when you want to include two dates within one item, but have only one of them be searchable. Going forward I will stop using text dates, and instead (as recommended by @Stuart_Gibbons) use a child with Dynalist date and a tag that will allow me to exclude the date from searches.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. I donât have many reference dates, so I put them all in one list and create a search âbuttonâ to exclude that list. Glad you found a solution for your use case.
