I find myself entering dates all the time. In filenames, for tasks and in documents. As I’m Productively Lazy I use a text expander to save me time.
Read through to the bottom of the post for a link to download the text expansions I use daily.
Date formats
I use 2 date formats. YYYY-MM-DD and d MMMM YYYY. For today these are 2022-06-09 and 9 June 2022. To create these I use PhraseExpress with the following keystrokes. All are set to run immediately upon keying in.
All calculations are smart enough to wrap over month and year boundaries.
Standard day text, used anywhere
Autotext abbreviation | Purpose | Example |
---|---|---|
d== | Today as YYYY-MM-DD | 2022-06-09 |
d++ | Tomorrow as YYYY-MM-DD | 2022-06-10 |
d– | Yesterday as YYYY-MM-DD | 2022-06-08 |
dd= | Today as d MMMM YYYY | 9 June 2022 |
dd+ | Tomorrow as d MMMM YYYY | 10 June 2022 |
dd- | Yesterday as d MMMM YYYY | 8 June 2022 |
d2w | 2 weeks from today | 23 June 2022 |
Getting Things Done
Within Obsidian I use the Dataview plugin‘s features to help me manage tasks. The way I work, I only need created and due dates. All are in YYYY-MM-DD format and is prefixed with a “| ” to help split dates on a row eg “| π2022-06-09”.
The “Next” abbreviations are smart enough to know that if today is Thursday, you mean Thursday next week, but Saturday this week.
Autotext abbreviation | Purpose | Example |
---|---|---|
#== | Due today | | π2022-06-09 |
#++ | Due tomorrow | | π2022-06-10 |
#1w | Due 1 week from today | | π2022-06-16 |
#2w | Due 2 weeks from today | | π2022-06-23 |
#3w | Due 3 weeks from today | | π2022-06-30 |
#4w | Due 4 weeks from today | | π2022-07-07 |
#– | Due yesterday | | π2022-06-08 |
#mon | Next Monday | | π2022-06-13 |
#tue | Next Tuesday | | π2022-06-14 |
#wed | Next Wednesday | | π2022-06-15 |
#thu | Next Thursday | | π2022-06-16 |
#fri | Next Friday | | π2022-06-17 |
#sat | Next Saturday | | π2022-06-19 |
#sun | Next Sunday | | π2022-06-19 |
I use !!! and a the Dataview plugin to filter out the must do today items.
Autotext abbreviation | Purpose | Example |
---|---|---|
!!! | Important | | π |
!== | Imporant today | | π | π2022-06-09 |
!++ | Important tomorrow | | π | π2022-06-10 |
Whenver I have a “@waiting for
” task, I put in the date I started waiting using:
Autotext abbreviation | Purpose | Example |
---|---|---|
+== | Started waiting today | β2022-06-09 |
+– | Started waiting yesterday | β2022-06-08 |
Download my abbreviations
You can download a file containing my abbreviations for import into PhraseExpress. Expand the .zip file and the import. They will all work on Windows. The day based Getting Things Done abbreviations (Mon-Sun) may not work so well on a Mac.
https://quantumgardenerdotblog.files.wordpress.com/2022/06/dates.zip