I use OF to control the payment of recurring bills. This doesn’t mean I can pay them on their due date.
Today is 10th of the month, the bill was due on the 7th and it is shown overdue. I know I can’t pay it before the 20th of the month.
If I don’t do anything, it will stay there, as overdue. I don’t like this, even though it’s my sad reality.
If I change the due date to the 20th (when I can actually pay it), when I complete the task, next month’s task (created by the repeating feature) will have a wrong due date.
What I’m currently doing is creating a new task with the same title, new due date (20th) and ‘completing’ the recurring task.
Do you guys have a better idea? If you were in my shoes, which option would you use?
This isn’t answering your question but perhaps there are other issues that you must tackle first such as “better money flow” or “expenses control”? This might be the opportunity to create a project that says “find more opportunities to earn money” or “restructure and cut down expenses”. Then try to brainstorm ways to either generate more cash flow or to reduce expenses so that you can afford to pay it on the 7th. Or perhaps negotiate with the other party so that you can work out a different payment schedule or monthly instalment. You’ll be surprised at how flexible some companies are.
I tend to like the red text screaming at me to say “take care of me now” instead of “ignoring me”.
But to really answer your question: Maybe you’ll need to change your defer date to the 17th of each month and the due date to the 20th of each month. This task won’t be show up in perspectives that show available actions until the 17th and it won’t scream due until the 20th.
But changing this is really just putting lipstick on a pig. I personally think you should try to tackle the source of the problem (no money on the 7th) and not necessarily the symptoms (late payment). Good luck to you. I’ve been there…
This is the one area where I think OF would benefit from emulating Things’ approach. In Things, a recurring task isn’t a task per se, but a formula that creates new instances of the task at the specified interval. The individual instances can be altered (delayed, deleted, etc.) without affecting the formula.
This would be perfect. This is how YNAB (mentioned by Splinky) deals with recurring bills. I don’t see any advantages how it currently is over your suggestion.
I prefer the way how Things treats recurring tasks.
Actually this scenario is quite usual. I have some monthly recurring tasks with defer and due dates. They are a group of sequential actions and include “Waiting for” actions. Sometimes the Waiting actions cannot be guaranteed by due dates and therefore the due dates of following actions need to be adjusted for that particular month.
However, adjusting due dates in OF means changing due dates for all future actions instead of just that particular month.
