Commitments and deadlines

A commitment is a dated promise — to others, or a hard promise to yourself. Cuaderno keeps these distinct from your to-do list and gives you one aggregated view of everything with a deadline, wherever it lives.

The aggregated view

cdno commitments              # everything due, sorted by date, overdue flagged
cdno commitments --weeks 6    # look six weeks ahead instead of the default two

cdno commitments is a computed view. It always includes a 30-day overdue look-back on top of the lookahead window, so nothing slips silently into the past. It draws from four sources (see Business rules):

1. Project milestones marked --hard.
2. Stewardship periodic commitments (recurring dashboard lines).
3. Standalone commitment notes (below).
4. Action notes with a self-imposed due: not tied to a milestone.

Standalone commitments

For a one-off promise that isn’t naturally a project milestone or a recurring stewardship line:

cdno commit create --title "Pay rent" --due 2026-06-01 --context personal
# -> commitments/pay-rent.md

# Optionally attribute it to a project or stewardship:
cdno commit create --title "Review Erik's draft" --due 2026-05-20 --context work --project projects/icml-paper

When it’s fulfilled, mark it done — it’s stamped and moved to commitments/_done/<year>/:

cdno commit done --slug pay-rent

When a promise ends without being kept

Not every promise is kept. The client cancels, the plan changes, the thing is overtaken by events. Marking it done would be the wrong record — cdno commitments and every weekly and monthly review read the daily log back, and a completion says the promise was fulfilled:

cdno commit drop --slug quarterly-report --reason "the client cancelled the engagement"

The note is archived beside your completed ones, stamped status: dropped with no completion date, so it never counts as finished work. --reason is optional; a typo needs no explanation, a cancellation usually deserves one.

If the date merely moved, reschedule is the verb you want — it records the move rather than ending the promise.

Nothing is destroyed by a drop: the note keeps its body and its created date. But a drop is re-decided rather than undone — there is no un-drop. If the promise comes back, make it again, and the record honestly shows both decisions.

Deadlines that live elsewhere

You often don’t need a standalone note — put the deadline where the work is:

# A hard project milestone shows up in `cdno commitments`:
cdno project milestone add --slug icml-paper --title "Camera-ready" --date 2026-02-01 --hard

# A recurring obligation on a stewardship dashboard:
cdno stewardship add-periodic --stewardship finances --title "File quarterly taxes" \
     --every "every 3 months" --next 2026-07-15

Both surface in the same aggregated list, so cdno commitments is the single place to answer “what have I promised, and when?”.

Next: Stewardships and tracking.