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Actually, you hinted at it right there: just surround the name in quotation marks (as mentioned in our FAQ.

You can mix that with Smart Add syntax too, e.g. "Cancel appt with Dr. Smith on Friday" due tomorrow #Phone !1

Hope this helps!

Posted 2 years ago

If you surround a task with quotes you get the quotes in the task. I don't believe items should be in quotes unless they have a proper need to be quoted: read book "Getting Things Done" but not "Call Mom about Lunch on Friday"

The current method is especially irritating to me because of the parsing power of the smart add. There are so many ways to enter a date and it can be anywhere in the task so I often set dates by mistake. (interestingly, it appears that "now" has to be at the beginning or the end to set a due date)

You can't even use the word simple words without it setting a due date! (Assuming of course that I don't use quotes around every task)

entering the task: "Throw the milk out it sat on the counter all day" would set the due date for Saturday.

Thankfully I don't know anyone named Tom or simply forgetting to capitalize the T turns "shoot pool with tom" into "shoot pool with" and due tomorrow and would no longer show up on a search for tasks when I mentioned Tom.

"Buy 1/2 Socket Wrench" or "Buy milk, we are down to 1/2 gallon" both come out as due in January! I'll probably need it before then.

Not to mention all of times that I use the name of a day in a task "Update Monday morning reports to include new employees"

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You have a setting to turn off smart add can you split that into two options?

- Use Smart Date Parsing (tom or tomorrow sets a due date but the modifiers have no affect )
- Use Smart Add (allows any of the !, #, ^, *,@, = modifiers to work but does not parse a date string)

This way you can choose either or both of the options to use the system in the way that is most natural to you.

Posted 2 years ago

Thanks for posting back; this is on our list to investigate.

Posted 2 years ago

whizzard

Funny, I just came in here to ask for exactly this change! Thanks steveshay for saving me the typing.

I've come close to making serious errors due to this issue - so far, I've always caught them before they matter (e.g. in my GTD weekly review) but it's only a matter of time before I miss one and it does matter.

(one thing that compounds the matter is that my "due dates" are more like "start dates" - I may not see an event until its date comes up. My next actions don't have dates at all - if I accidentally set a date for one, it won't appear in my next action lists. This is perhaps not how most people use RTM but I can't be alone here.)

So, +1

Posted 2 years ago