Every Org mode user knows that you can add tasks to your Org agenda with a SCHEDULED or DEADLINE keyword. That will cause your agenda to warn you ahead of time of upcoming tasks requiring your attention. Emacs also has an appointment system—tied to the diary—that will give you an active warning just before you need to act.
It would be nice if you could have those agenda tasks somehow be promoted to appointments so that you’d get a timely warning when the task is due to be acted on. It’s Emacs so of course you can. The idea is pretty old. Here’s Sacha Chua writing about it before it became part of Emacs in 2007. The answer is to use org-agenda-to-appt. It will scan your agenda files and set appointments for each entry that has a SCHEDULED or DEADLINE keyword.
The problem is automating this. You don’t want to have to call org-agenda-to-appt every time you add a task with an action date. Over at Dave’s Blog, Dave has a solution. It amounts to running org-agenda-to-appt every hour to pick up new potential appointments. See Dave’s post for the details.
What you’d really like is to be able to advise the agenda functions to add the appointment when you add a new agenda item. That’s non-trivial but probably doable. In the mean time, Dave’s solution is a reasonable approach if you’d like to try automatically promoting your agenda items to appointments.