Dappoint

Dappoint is a term used in scheduling and operations research to describe a mechanism for managing time-bound tasks by deferring non-urgent appointments to achieve more efficient use of limited resources. The term appears in theoretical discussions and in practical software design as a way to balance demand and capacity in calendars, queues, and task schedulers.

At its core, dappoint relies on classifying tasks by urgency or deadline, and then postponing those with lower priority when resources are tight. Postponement is bounded by constraints such as earliest start times, latest permissible completion, or customer service levels. Implementations combine forward planning with real-time rescheduling, using policies such as earliest-deadline-first with backfilling, slack time accounting, or predictive workload models.

Dappoint has been applied in several domains. In healthcare, it can smooth patient flow by delaying non-urgent appointments to off-peak times without violating critical deadlines. In IT and cloud environments, it informs job scheduling to reduce peak load, improve throughput, and reduce idle resources. In event management and professional services, it helps align staff availability with demand forecasts.

Critics point to the risk of missed deadlines, increased customer wait times, and added complexity in scheduling systems. Proponents note that, when constraints are well defined, dappoint can improve utilization, reduce wait times overall, and provide better resilience to demand spikes.

See also: scheduling, queuing theory, backfilling, deadline-aware scheduling.