honel, thanks for your feedback! Unfortunately it's not currently possible to search by due date with negative time periods, but it's something that we may be able to look at.

Have you made any progress in determining if and when this function is available? I too believe it to be a very powerful feature if its available.

How about searches like the following:

dueWithin:"1 week of today" AND dueBefore:tomorrow

Is that sort of what you are looking for? That flags just the stuff that's recently overdue for me.

Interesting, ran, but back when I tried it, the dueWithin search operator didn't seem to catch negative due dates, only positive ones. Might test again to see if it works now..

I too would like to save a search that tells me what tasks are overdue by a week or less to tell me what I have recently overlooked.

Is this possible yet? I tried:

dueWithin:"1 week of today" AND dueBefore:tomorrow"

but it returned nothing though I know there are overdue tasks less than a week old.

Or when this may be possible?

I stand corrected. dueWithin only catches future items. That's frustrating. Sorry for the false hope. Arvid, Emily - any idea why this might be?

Yup, dueWithin is a future-only search (addedWithin and completedWithin are past-only). I don't think any of the search operators currently allow you to search for overdue by less than a week unfortunately, as we'd need to have searching due dates with negative time periods (something like "due within minus one week" or "due in the last week").

this worked for me:

dueWithin:"1 day of 18 oct 2008"

today, 20 oct 2008. It's a fixed date, so you can put it in a smart list but you'd have to edit the list every day.

I read this tip from
http://www.jeffstanden.com/blog/2007/12/30/remember-the-milk-1-month-review-tips/
and modify it a little bit.
If you put "dueBefore:today", that will return all the tasks that are overdue. Tested!
As of with the reference link, it suggested "dueBefore:tomorrow" to return overdue tasks and due-today tasks.

Happy Remembering The Milk!

Hola a todos, hace unos meses que utilizo RTM en mi trabajo diario, y que puedo decir que otros no hallan comentado: RTM es simple, poderoso y efectivo!

Ahora bien para sacarle el jugo a la planificación semanal yo listo los no hecho la ultima semana, lo que en TEORÍA sería buscar como sigue:

dueBefore:"tomorrow" AND dueAfter:"last week"
o
dueBefore:"tomorrow" AND dueAfter:"-7 day"

Por el momento no funciona dueAfter:"last week" ni dueAfter:"-7 day", por lo que en la PRACTICA para mi planificación de esta semana utilizo la siguiente búsqueda:

dueBefore:"tomorrow" AND dueAfter:"13/4/2009"

by

PD: RTM Team actualizar el parser para que funcione con números negativos no es un cambio mayor, en donde esta el problema?

i've been using the technique i posted above for quite some time and it works quite well, but it's not automatic.

today is "25 apr 2009" and i want to see things that were due in the last week, so i specify:

dueWithin:"7 days of 18 Apr 2009"

Note that 18 Apr is 7 days in the past.

This does exactly what i want. I Just have to increment the 18 Apr by one day every day to keep it "relative";

What i do to make this easier on myself is to say:

dueWithin:"20 days of 15 Apr 2009"

This gets me all the tasks due in the last 10 days, plus all the tasks due in the next 10 days. But i can sort by due date and the overdue task will be at the top.

Then, i only have to update the 15 Apr date every 10 days or so to keep up with the current time. It's a littler easier.

I find it tricky to see what this is doing, conceptually, so i'll state it again: Since due date search always only looks forward in time, i specify a date in the PAST and ask for due dates after that date, which can include today.

I'm a big fan of RTM, but am very confused that this is not a standard feature. It seems from above that I am not able to create a simple smart list that shows me tasks due yesterday and today. Seems like a fairly common thing....at the end of the day I want a quick view of what didn't get done (or didn't mark as complete) today, and what's coming tomorrow. would love to see this ability.

That you can do, check out at the end of the day what you have still left on your task list and what's up tomorrow.

Unfortunately, you can't do the same thing early the next day, check what's left from yesterday and due today.

What's missing in RTM is the support for "yesterday", that would help a lot (hint to Emily ;-)

well, unfortunately, my day often ends after midnight so that solution doesn't work! listen up Emily ;-) thanks

+1 vote for implemented "yesterday" and/or "today" with negative values (to capture the day before yesterday, etc.)

Yes, I too wish there was a "yesterday" feature - it would be really cool! Until the feature is implemented, RTM cannot invite Sir Paul McCartney to use the software. :-( i.e. "Yesterday" one of the Beatles classics could not have been written with the help of RTM which is a great shame. Having said that I don't advocate RTM introducing an "Eight Days a Week" feature :-)

Can't agree more - the ability to search using negative values is essential and a common feature in most other similar programs. PLEASE add this feature asap. This thread goes back years, so really hoping someone at RTM starts to pay attention to what appears to be an oft requested feature.

I was referred to this post by the team after recommending a feature recommended here (in general terms for any task management system): http://skornyakov.info/2011/12/overcoming-negative-motivation-todo/

It's about giving the user an overview of tasks finished in order to give a sense of accomplishment (instead of beating oneself up about the never-shrinking list of tasks still ahead).

So I guess what would be nice (while, admittedly, not essential for the core process of managing your tasks) would be a status feature (e.g., as an extra box on the right hand side of the task list) that would let the user know, how many task with which total amount of planned time he/she has finished on the current day and maybe in the current week. This could be extended to something like average tasks finished per day over longer periods togive a frame of reference.

This could basically serve as both a motivator (hey, you've [not] gotten stuff done today) and a performance measurement tool.

IMHO, the feature described above would build on top of the suggested extension of the search function to negative due dates. That function alone wouldn't accomplish what I described, though (since a user would basically still have to build his own list and evaluate manually).

I, too, would like this feature. The ability to have a smart list showing overdue items from the last week only would be a huge boon.

nah.why, your solution looks like the best way to handle it for now. Thank you. :)

Please, I would love this feature too.

I use lists for important and urgent things, and being able to augment the urgency as tasks get late, it would add a tremendous value to the smart lists.

And it doesn't seem soooo hard to develop!

I would love this as well. Thought it was something I could do with advanced query language.

Sad to learn it was first suggested by someone 9 years ago :)

I would love this feature too

I'd also like to be able to do this, but more specifically with Start dates. I'd like to have a 'Recently Started' list that just brings back items that Started in the last 2 weeks. StartBefore:Today brings back too many results for that Smart List to be useful for me.

Me too... Like many of you, I have overdue tasks scattered throughout the past. I need to be able to exclude things that were due 6 months ago and are dead in the water, while still calling up what's only overdue by a few days. "Yesterday" helps but doesn't go far enough into the past.

"Last month" or "this year" or "next month" aren't ambiguous. "1 week ago" or "6 days ago" aren't ambiguous. "Last/this/next week" is only ambiguous because of a question about what day one's week begins on, and if the developers don't want to deal with allowing users to choose the first day of our week, then simply tell us it defaults to Sunday (my preference!) or Monday.

Actually, what's truly ambiguous is the search operator "Within." The developers have defaulted "Within" to refer only to the future when searching for start or due dates, and only to the past when searching for added or completed dates. It's too late to change its meaning without inconveniencing lots of users, but but there is a crying need to search due and start dates a limited time backwards, and "last" and "ago" are the natural language words which accomplish that.

I just renewed for another year and was looking to see if it was ever implemented, since I still can't get the queries to work.

I see that I posted in this thread 6 months ago and nothing has changed.

I too am confused why every within "1 week of today" type query is forward searching yet there is no ability to have logic such as:
- dueWithin:"1 week ago"
- dueWithin:"last week"
- dueAfter:"1 week ago" and dueBefore:"today"

So, still no progress on due:"2 days ago"? I cannot believe it's been 6 years since I first asked about that :-D I still get surprised every few months that such a rudimentary operator is *still* not implemented...

Also amazed this feature doesn't exist. Just spent way too much time searching, only to finally get a definitive (and disappointing) answer here.

Add me to the list of those that want negative searches. Perhaps something like
dueWithin: +7days
dueWithin: -7days
to look forward and back a week from today.

Even though this is a really old thread, I'll also throw my vote in. I could really use this functionality, but 11 years late, doesn't seem likely. :-(

How is this not implemented after 12 years of begging by users??? For a while I've been getting the feeling that this company doesn't give a damn about us users. Might be time to look elsewhere :/

This certainly has my vote. I asked about it in the Help forums prior to seeing this idea (https://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/help/23239/).

I'd like to see tasks that are 1 week or more overdue. Using dueWithin, dueAfter, or dueBefore with relative times ("1 week" for example) rather than hard dates will always look future (1 week in the future). I'd love to tell it "1 week ago" or as has been suggested "-7 days"? And, of course, the same would hold for startWithin, startAfter, and startBefore.

Thanks for considering this.

I'm waiting for the feature for years and now put also my vote an this.

Same. This is a truly critical function for managing work flow, and (as a programmer) should be really quite easy to implement!