Hi Phil,

Phil Jackson <phil@shellarchive.co.uk> writes:

> Something I thought might be nice is highlighting of timestamps
> according to there relativity to time().
>
> For example, at time of writing, <2006-12-11> would be red, <2007-12-03
> Mon 19:00> pink. Perhaps for customisation:
>
> (setq org-timestamp-colour-map
>  '(("<2h" . 'face)
>    ("<10m" . 'face)))

I like the general idea of having feedback about the proximity of a
deadline or time-stamp.  But I think doing this interactively is better,
since the values like "<2h" "<10m" (in your example) are very likely to
change quite often, no?

In the same spirit, I've written this, which let you check for deadlines
or scheduled items before a date (strings like "+2d" are okay):

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(defun org-check-before-date (date)
  "Check if there are deadlines or scheduled entries before DATE."
  (interactive (list (org-read-date)))
  (let ((case-fold-search nil)
	(regexp (concat "\\<\\(" org-deadline-string 
			"\\|" org-scheduled-string 
			"\\) *<\\([^>]+\\)>"))
	(callback
	 (lambda () (time-less-p
		     (org-time-string-to-time (match-string 2))
		     (org-time-string-to-time date)))))
    (message "%d entries before %s"
	     (org-occur regexp nil callback) date)))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

If you want to permanently add this to `org-sparse-trees', here is a
patch against 5.16b.