--- title: Calendar items description: The four kinds of thing you can put on a Calendite calendar — events, reminders, deadlines and time periods — and what each one does differently. order: 2 --- # Calendar items Not everything on a calendar is an event. A thing you have to *do* behaves differently from a thing you *attend*, and a fortnight in Spain behaves differently from both. Calendite makes that explicit: tapping **NEW** asks **Choose a Calendar Item** first, and what you pick decides which fields the form then shows you. There are four. | Item | What it is | Measured in | |---|---|---| | **Event** | Something that starts, and later ends. | Clock time | | **Reminder** | A nudge at a moment. Rings or notifies. | A single moment | | **Deadline** | A moment something is due by. Counts down. | A single moment | | **Time period** | A span of whole days — a holiday, or time off. | Days | You choose once, when you create the thing. What something *is* isn't a field you edit later, so the form never morphs under you mid-way through filling it in. --- ## Event The ordinary case. A start time, an end time, and a duration — or tick **All day** and it loses its times and sits in the band above the grid. Everything else in these docs — [repeats](/docs/everyday-use/repeating-events.html), [inner and variant events](/docs/everyday-use/inner-and-variant-events.html), [locations](/docs/everyday-use/location-and-places.html) — applies to events, and mostly to the other three as well. --- ## Reminder Something you have to do, rather than attend. It differs from an event in three ways that matter: - **No duration.** It's a point in time, not a span, and it's never all-day. - **The alert is mandatory.** A reminder that never fires is pointless, so it always carries exactly one — an **Alarm** or a **Notification**, chosen on the form. - **It can be completed.** Events happen to you; reminders get ticked off. A recurring reminder can also be anchored to *when you actually did it* rather than to the schedule. See [Reminders and alerts](/docs/everyday-use/reminders-and-alerts.html). --- ## Deadline A moment something is **due by**. Like a reminder it is a single point in time and can be ticked off — but its alerts are **optional**, because the countdown is the nag. Its detail screen leads with how long is left. Once the moment passes without being marked done, the same figure counts *up* instead, in the danger colour: how long it has been overdue. A deadline that quietly stopped mentioning it would have failed at the one job it has. A new deadline starts with three notifications already filled in — a week before, 9am the day before, and an hour before. They're seeded into the form, not forced, so edit or delete any of them like alerts you added yourself. --- ## Time period A span of **whole days**: a holiday you're going on, or time off work. Where an event has a start time and an end time, a time period has a start **date** and an end **date**. It is always all-day — a holiday that runs 09:00–17:00 isn't a thing — and its length is measured in days rather than hours. - **It can't be completed.** A holiday isn't a task. - **It doesn't count down.** That's what a deadline is for, and the app-wide countdown notification is skipped too — counting down to the start of something all-day would mean counting down to midnight. - **It appears on every day it covers**, not only the day it begins. ### Where it shows up | View | How it looks | |---|---| | **Month** | One continuous bar across the days it covers, titled once. Rounded ends where the period genuinely starts and finishes; a chevron where it simply carries on into the next week. | | **Week** | A band on each day's row. The week view is [transposed](/docs/everyday-use/calendar-views.html) — days are rows — so each row is named, keeping it readable when you're looking at one day on its own. | | **Day** | A band in the all-day strip, on every day of the period. | | **Events** | Listed once, on its start day, showing its length and the day it runs to. | ### Setting the dates Tapping either the start or the end date opens **one** picker showing the whole range, because a start and an end aren't two independent dates — an end before its start isn't something you should be able to express. Pick the start, then the end. Or type them: day, month and year each have their own box, so there's no separator to type, and the calendar above follows what you type. **Clear** empties the range and starts you again. Both the numeric date and the long form beneath it follow your device's locale, so the field order, the separator and the month names are whatever your phone already uses. ### Time periods can repeat Annual leave, or the same week off every year. A repeating time period has **two** different ends, and it's worth keeping them straight: | | What it means | |---|---| | **End date** | When *this* period finishes — the last day of the holiday. | | **Repeat ends** | When the *series* stops recurring, set in the Repeat sheet. | A trip running 24 December to 2 January, every year until 2030, uses both: the end date is 2 January, and the repeat ends in 2030. Each occurrence runs the same number of days from its own start, so the length travels with the period rather than every year ending on the first year's end date. --- ## Next - [Calendar views](/docs/everyday-use/calendar-views.html) — where each item shows up - [Reminders and alerts](/docs/everyday-use/reminders-and-alerts.html) — alarms, notifications and alert text - [Repeating events](/docs/everyday-use/repeating-events.html) — making any of these recur