Does anyone have a workflow (perhaps automation-based) for tasks that automatically expire or reset if not completed by their repeat date? Here are my two use cases:
I have a daily task with, let’s say 5 subtasks. If I don’t finish all the subtasks by the end of the day, I want the whole thing to start over the next day. Otherwise, I find myself doing tasks 1–3 on Monday, then 4 and 5 on Tuesday, and suddenly remembering at some point that I was supposed to do 1–3 again as well.
I have some client work where the actual tasks are in other systems, but my responsibility is to do put in X hours per month for a particular client. It’d be great to be able to have tasks like:
Make sure you’ve done 5 hours for client by this week
Make sure you’ve done 10 hours for client by this week
Make sure you’ve done 15 hours for client by this week
Make sure you’ve done 20 hours for client by this week
and have each one of these automatically disappear at the end of the week if it doesn’t get completed.
This 2nd case doesn’t really feel like what Omnifocus is “for”, but if there were some workflow for me to shoehorn it in, that sounds a lot easier than adding another piece of software to my system.
I use these scheme quite extensively.
I have a project “Routines”.
In the project I have tasks “--------- daily morning”, “--------- daily evening”, “--------- weekly”, “--------- every two weeks” “--------- monthly”, “--------- quarterly” “--------- yearly”.
In these tasks I have many tasks for the particular recurrence period.
Dashes help to distinguish it is just a placeholder on a list of tasks in Forecast.
But… this is the hack:
Every day I need to select all missing tasks in “--------- daily …” and click “Drop” on the right for all of them.
I got accustomed to it and it works brilliantly.
Bonus: if you look into Projects and enable displaying all tasks you will see history of your work - which tasks from “daily” you did on a particular day and which not.
I believe we could use some automation BUT there are often times that I quickly do something in the morning that I was supposed to do in the evening the day before. So do it manually is IMHO much, much more practical.
There is one more crucial thing. Every repeating group has to have “Repeat from this item’s” Assigned Dates.
Thanks to this repeating scheme keeps precisely in given week/month etc. (does not “slide” into the future).
Bonus: you can set due date for every task within the group and these scheme is also preserved from period to period (for example things you usually do on Mondays in “weekly” routine, or birthdays of your relatives in “yearly” routine.
Whoa, thanks @andrzej. This is very interesting! I wouldn’t have expected the dropped subtasks to come back when the task recurs, but I just tested it and they did. Odd behavior, but very useful in this case! I’ll give this a try.
