Dates
Table of contents
You don’t have to use all available dates. Maybe due dates are sufficient for you. Don’t over-engineer your task management.
Info
Instead of adding an emoji and a date manually, you can use the Tasks: Create or edit command when creating or editing a task. When you use the command, you can also set dates like “Monday”, “tomorrow”, or “next week” and Tasks will automatically save the date in the correct format.
📅 Due
Tasks can have dates by when they must be done: due dates. In order to specify the due date of a task, you must append the “due date signifier 📅” followed by the date it is due to the end of the task. The date must be in the format YYYY-MM-DD, meaning Year-Month-Day with leading zeros. For example: 📅 2021-04-09 means the task is due on the 9th of April, 2021.
- [ ] take out the trash 📅 2021-04-09
⏳ Scheduled
Tasks can have dates on which you plan to work on them: scheduled dates. Scheduled dates are different from due dates as you can schedule to finish a task before it is due.
Scheduled dates use an hourglass emoji instead of a calendar emoji.
- [ ] take out the trash ⏳ 2021-04-09
🛫 Start
It can happen that you cannot work on a task before a certain date. Or you want to hide a task until a certain date. In that case you can use start dates.
Start dates use a departing airplane emoji instead of a calendar emoji.
- [ ] take out the trash 🛫 2021-04-09
When [[4-queries-basic/filters.md#start-date|filtering]] queries by start date, the result will include tasks without a start date. This way, you can use the start date as a filter to filter out any tasks that you cannot yet work on.
Such filter could be:
```tasks
starts before tomorrow
```