Using Relative Dates When Managing Your Projects
Posted by Denis Ahearn on April 07, 2010
Our CEO Steve Kickert recently posted a tip on the OnePlace forum for quickly entering dates using a relative offset from today (see Steve's tip). Since then I've found myself using this bit of magic quite often when scheduling my work. So often in fact that I felt it was worth repeating this technique here in case you missed it over on the forum.
Most dates in OnePlace can be entered in one of two ways. You can type the date in by hand using a text input, or, you can choose the date from a pop up date picker. Pretty standard stuff. However, lurking under the covers is this sweet ability to enter a special keyword or a number which is relative to today's date.
For example, suppose you are creating a new task, and you want to schedule it and set a deadline for it. In the "Schedule on" field, if you enter "tomorrow", the task will get scheduled for tomorrow. In the "Deadline" field, if you enter "+5", the task will have a deadline 5 days out from today.
Here are the valid relative dates you can enter
- today - Enters today's date
- tomorrow - Enters tomorrow's date
- yesterday - Enters yesterday's date
- +N - Enters a date N days from today
Note that when you use a relative date, OnePlace will automatically turn it into an absolute date when you save your data. After this point, the date is just like any other date. Relative dates are a one-way, one-time conversion.
One of our customers is taking advantage of relative dates in an automated process they developed that emails tasks into OnePlace. Depending on the type of task being created, their automated process will assign it a relative deadline from the date the tasks is created. Clever!
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