Experimentation shows that in the context of 'today', time
is taken into account. Deadline < today is finding a note made to test your question this afternoon (in UK) - the time is 14:48. It's now 22:40. If I change the latter note's time (date stays the same) to 23:40 it's now excluded.
Doh! I didn't read the full section I quoted from the manual (I don't use dates a lot). Manual p.114, section "Agents, Dates and times":
Quote:Agents regard two dates as being equal if they share the same year, month, and day -- regardless of the time of day.
The comparison operators >, >=, < and <= compare both date and time, so the same note could be found by two agents: one that locates theDate < todayand another that searches for theDate = today.
What's catching you out is '=' acts differently in that it ignores time unlike other comparison operators.
So time does matter but, as already discussed default time is always 00:00 unless you set it manually or through some string. I found this worked as as a test agent action:
MyDate = yesterday 09:00..and my date attribute duly had a date of yesterday and time of 09:00. I suspect local setting for time/date may have some bearing on the time format. Here in UK (UK OS settings in 10.4.11) I'm doing fine with 24hr hours and with a colon hour/minute delimiter.