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8.3.1 Inserting deadlines or schedules

The following commands allow you to quickly insert a deadline or to schedule an item:1

C-c C-d (org-deadline)​

Insert ‘DEADLINE’ keyword along with a stamp. The insertion happens in the line directly following the headline. Remove any ‘CLOSED’ timestamp . When called with a prefix argument, also remove any existing deadline from the entry. Depending on the variable org-log-redeadline, take a note when changing an existing deadline2.

C-c C-s (org-schedule)​

Insert ‘SCHEDULED’ keyword along with a stamp. The insertion happens in the line directly following the headline. Remove any ‘CLOSED’ timestamp. When called with a prefix argument, also remove the scheduling date from the entry. Depending on the variable org-log-reschedule, take a note when changing an existing scheduling time3.

C-c / d (org-check-deadlines)​

Create a sparse tree with all deadlines that are either past-due, or which will become due within org-deadline-warning-days. With C-u prefix, show all deadlines in the file. With a numeric prefix, check that many days. For example, C-1 C-c / d shows all deadlines due tomorrow.

C-c / b (org-check-before-date)​

Sparse tree for deadlines and scheduled items before a given date.

C-c / a (org-check-after-date)​

Sparse tree for deadlines and scheduled items after a given date.

Note that org-schedule and org-deadline supports setting the date by indicating a relative time e.g., ‘+1d’ sets the date to the next day after today, and ‘--1w’ sets the date to the previous week before any current timestamp.

  1. The ‘SCHEDULED’ and ‘DEADLINE’ dates are inserted on the line right below the headline. Do not put any text between this line and the headline.↩
  2. Note the corresponding ‘STARTUP’ options ‘logredeadline’, ‘lognoteredeadline’, and ‘nologredeadline’.↩
  3. Note the corresponding ‘STARTUP’ options ‘logreschedule’, ‘lognotereschedule’, and ‘nologreschedule’.↩