I just ran into an unexpected side effect of the solution to a question I asked here last October.
From that time on, I have been using “repeat on completion” for daily repeating tasks.
However, if for some reason, I don’t do the thing and only notice it the next day, my natural instinct is to use “skip this occurrence”, which is in fact what I actually did. This happened today and I expected to find it waiting to be done today. But no, it was sent to tomorrow, which I didn’t find very logical. I had noticed this before but thought each time that I had done something wrong so this time I was careful.
After having reread the October thread, it seems that this would not happen if the repeat was set to “Assigned Date”. So, to be able to skip the occurrence of a task not done yesterday, I must use “Assigned Date”, but then, some other time, I can’t defer the action to the next day without creating a duplicate. If I use “Completion”, and the task isn’t done, it must be deferred, never skipped.
The rule seems to be: when a daily repeating action was not done the previous day, if it has an “Assigned Date” it must be skipped, if it repeats on “Completion” it must be deferred.
I think you are broadly correct, however I think you could just defer both types of repeat settings for that matter.
I always quickly remember whether a task is Repeat by completion date or Repeat by assigned dates before I decide to defer or skip.
I really like the touch menu option of defer by one day, because it is so simple. I find myself using that perhaps a bit too frequently! That tends to be tasks that have just a defer date in any case.
With these tasks which have just a defer date and ‘Repeat on completion’, once they become available they can sit there for as long as you like; no pressure to perform them.
You have the option of manually deferring the same task using ‘Reschedule to Tomorrow’, which defers it until the next day.
If you choose ‘Skip Occurence’, this has the effect of changing the status of the task to ‘Dropped’ and creating a new occurence, in this case deferred to tomorrow. The advantage of this is that you keep a record of which days you decided not to do the task. I’d say this is useful for tasks which are repeating on a fixed schedule (repeat based on ‘Assigned Dates’), but not so much for your tasks which are just deferred and repeat ‘on completion’.
So in conclusion, in your case I would use just ‘Reschedule to Tomorrow’. Remember that this action you are seeing is an option to do it today — it’s not some task that you should have done in the past and need to explicitly skip to keep things on track.
Currently I’m using a scheme where I avoid using a due unless it really is DUE, so most of my repeating tasks just become available when ready.
I’ve also assigned them an optional tag so I have the choice of simply ignoring them (with a perspective that excludes optional tasks), deferring them or completing them make it go away until the next repeat.
Generally I prefer simply ignoring them as I have another perspective that shows my optional tasks grouped by defer so I can see just how long I’ve been ignoring them!
Right, using a due date only when there is a clear deadline is the way to go. Many years ago I was also applying them for desired completion and I became blind to all due dates, as many others have observed.
In my mind, all available tasks are optional to do right now. For repeating tasks which I consider routines, I look at them in a few dedicated perspectives and make decisions (flag as urgent, defer some more, or leave as is which keeps the option open), which sounds similar to your workflow.
