How can I list In-Progress tasks?

[dbc60]

Your tasks plugin is wonderful. I use it for slicing and dicing tasks, meetings, and events based on due dates, scheduled dates, and start dates. Is there a way to separate tasks with start dates of today and older, what I think of as "in progress tasks", from those with no start date?

I was hoping to use "starts before tomorrow", but. as you documented, it includes everything that "no start date" covers in addition to tasks with start dates before tomorrow. I don't want to ask to change the behavior of "start before xxx" to not include what "no start date" includes out of concern of breaking others' use of this plugin. Maybe a "with start date" or "has start date" filter would be reasonable? Maybe there's a way to do it that I just haven't thought of.

In the meantime, I'll add a hashtag or something to in-progress tasks and use the "description includes" filter as a workaround. Still, I was hoping for a way to use just dates. It would be a bit faster and simpler.

Thanks so much!

[therden]

@dbc60: I believe that using Scheduled dates in place of Start dates and 'scheduled before tomorrow' in place of 'starts before tomorrow' will give you the result you're seeking.

In Tasks, the purpose of Start is to exclude tasks from query results. Assigning a Start date is equivalent to saying 'I don't want to see (or work on) this task until this date'. (That's why querying on Start returns tasks that don't have a Start date -- because you don't need to wait until the Start date before performing the task.)

Assigning a Scheduled date works the way that you expected assigning a Start date would -- it signifies that work on that task either 'commenced on this date' (if in the past) or that it 'should commence as of this date' (if in the future).

[dbc60]

@therden Thanks for helping me better understand the purpose of Start vs Scheduled dates. I was using Scheduled dates to distinguish meetings from tasks. It seemed to be a reasonable distinction at the time, as meetings are scheduled and tasks have due dates and start dates.

I'll give schedules a try, figure out something else for meetings, and see how it goes.