7.2.2.1 Task-based Appointments

A task has an appointment if it looks like this:

     #A   _ @12:45 Do something (TaskPool)

i.e., if it has @ followed by a time at the beginning. This means the task is a regular appointment, and will not be carried forward at the start of a new day.

Alternatively, it may have a !, like this:

     #A   _ !12:45 Do something else (TaskPool)

This makes it a "nagging" appointment, which will be carried forward. It will, however, lose the appointment time in the process.

This may seem like a strange feature, but here is Henrik's reasoning:

Sometimes I have a task that I want to do at a certain time, so I make it an appointment. If I don't get around to doing it anyway, I want it to be carried forward. Basically, I sometimes use appointments on tasks to annoy me until I get them done. :)

You can edit, move and delete tasks with the usual functions, and appointments will be updated automatically.

You can update all task appointments on your page with

     M-x planner-appt-update

Cyclic Entries

If you have planner-cyclic (see Cyclic Tasks) loaded, entries in your cyclical tasks file such as

     Friday #A _ @12:45 staff meeting

will appear every Friday and there will be an appointment alert set up.

Appointments Section

You can have all task-based appointments copied to a separate section, providing an overview of your appointments.

To do this, add

     (setq planner-appt-task-use-appointments-section-flag t)

to your configuration, or use M-x customize-variable.

The variable planner-appt-task-appointments-section is the name of the section where the appointments will be copied. By default, it is set to "Schedule", which means that task appointments will be intermingled with schedule entries.

It is also a good idea to add the section you wish to use to planner-day-page-template in order to control where that section will appear on the page (otherwise it will appear at the top).

The format of the appointments follows that of a schedule; if you don't like the way it looks, you can write something different and set planner-appt-format-appt-section-line-function appropriately. See the documentation for planner-appt-format-appt-section-line-function for details. It should be fairly easy to see what needs to be done if you look at the source for the default function (which is planner-appt-format-appt-section-line).

If the section specified in planner-appt-task-appointments-section is the same as the schedule section specified in planner-appt-schedule-section (by default "Schedule"), the default formatting function adds a ‘#’ to the description so that one can visually distinguish appointments from the task list from those that have been added to the schedule.