Greetings, I am making a Siri Shortcut for a OF template when I am taking a trip. This is based off a shortcut that Rosemary Orchard made for scheduling a trip using Taskpaper in Drafts.
I am trying to schedule a due date of a subtask to be due before the trip. In Shortcuts I am useing the @due(“departure date” -2d) but it keeps setting the due date of as the departure date. I’ve also tried the “@defer” command.
Am I able to schedule a due date before the departure date?
Thanks for any help!
Yes, you can. There seems to be a bug with some date formatting though so try a different format 
Hi Rosemary, thanks for your time. I didn’t know there were different formats, is there one you might suggest?
Thanks
As it doesn’t matter to you I would suggest medium or long
Sorry Rosemary, I don’t understand, I’m new to all this. I’m not sure I understand medium or long. Would I be using @due(“departure date” -2days) ? Don’t know if that’s what you mean by long.
So this will affect the Taskpaper formatting in Drafts and allow me to schedule my packing subtask 2 days before the departure date?
Sorry, I’m not good at automation.
You don’t need to send to Drafts, just use the “add TaskPaper to OmniFocus” action
further down the workflow I have the “Add TaskPaper to OmniFocus” action but I can’t get the format correct to change the due date. Every month I have to go to the National Guard. So with the way the shortcut currently works is it creates all the tasks that I need to accomplish. One of them is to pack. What I would like is to have the due date for packing to be 2 days prior to my departure date. I am using the terminology in the screenshot that I included in my previous message but OmniFocus is setting the due date to the same date as the departure date. So my question is is there something that I am missing in the format of the screenshot above to change the due date of “Pack” to something other than the departure date?
This is all based on a workflow you created that can be found here: https://www.rosemaryorchard.com/blog/omnifocus-travel-plans
You need to do the calculation for the packing date in the Shortcut itself, not the TaskPaper bit.
Try this:
and then use the packingDate variable in your TaskPaper section.
You can change the time you want the task to be due at in the Format box (set to 09:00 in my screenshot).
Hope this helps.
Thank you for your help, Rosemary. Your efforts are greatly appreciated!
This is exactly what I needed, Tony, thank you so much. I never would have been able to figure this out. This is such a great community for someone just learning automation like myself.
Help from people like yourself and Rosemary Orchard is inspiring!
Technically this shouldn’t be necessary, OmniFocus can parse -2d after a date and calculate it itself. There’s a bug in the importer though I think - if I knew what date format were here I could track it down and email it in.
Agreed! I’ve tried playing around with TaskPaper in Drafts5 as well and never managed to get the times to calculate properly when running the TaskPaper import. The days manipulation (-2d or whatever) seemed to work, but not trying to set a time alongside the date. In the end I moved to Shortcuts and just did the maths before building the TaskPaper string. I wasn’t sure if it was me misinterpreting how to format the calculations, but hopefully it will get sorted in the not too distant future…
I experienced the same problem with date calculation. I worked with OF Support and we stumbled on the fact that inserting the Format Date action after getting the date input made things work. I use the Short option in Format Date, although I’m not sure that is the only thing that will work. Getting back to the original question, the following should work:
Ask for Input (Input type Date)
Format Date (Short, None)
Set Variable
The last action is probably not required, but I use it because I can keep track of the logic easier.
You can also just use the date variable (either from a date action or from an ask for input action) and format it however you want it as illustrated above:
