Maybe I’m just dense, but I need help understanding the difference among Repeat Every, Defer Another, and Due Again.
Repeat Every creates a new task each period with the Defer and Due dates you created with the original. For example, if you have a weekly task deferred to Friday and due Friday, Repeat Every Week will create a new copy of the task each Friday. It might help to understand that OF doesn’t create a repeating task as such - it creates a new copy of the task with the new dates each time you mark one copy Complete. If you did the weekly task for a while, and then looked at your history of completed tasks, you’d see a task for each past week.
Defer Another allows you to move the task start (earliest time you can start it) by the period - if you defer a task to Wednesday because you can’t begin it before then, then discover that you won’t be able to start it until Friday, you Defer Another 2 days. Think if is at “Change Start Date by …”
Due again applies to repeating tasks (as in my first example - it tells you when the next repeat is due. In the first example, Due Again will be the following Friday.
Hope that makes sense
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Thanks Nick. Seems like Defer Another is exactly what all the 3rd party “Snooze” applescripts do. Wish there was a button for this in the tool bar that you could set to 2 weeks or something as a preference to function as an easy “Snooze” button.
On repeating options, I am missing the “second tuesday each month” and the likes option a lot.
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“Snooze” is pretty much right. I surmise that the reason it doesn’t exist as a button is that we’re being discouraged from casually changing a date that should need bait of thought. “Defer” isn’t supposed to be “that’s when I feel like starting” - it’s supposed to be “I can’t start before then”. - it goes back to OF’s GTD roots.
Having said all that, you’re not obliged to follow GTD if you don’t want to - I don’t (at least, not very rigorously)
I haven’t looked too closely at the snooze applescripts, but I assume they change the defer date of the selected action. All of the repeat options apply when a repeating action is completed, and create a new action.
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@Nick’s description of repeat every is correct.
For example, in the US, taxes are due April 15. No matter whether I finish my taxes early or late this year, next year they are still due on April 15. This is a ‘repeat every’ kind of action. -
Due Again and Defer Another also create a new copy of the action, but sets the due or defer date relative to the time when you complete the original action.
I intend to clean out the garage every few months. So I have a ‘Defer another’ repeat on it of 2 months. Say I cleaned the garage on January 1, that project will become available again on March 1. If I didn’t get around to it until today (April 13), I want my next reminder to be 2 months from now (June 13), rather than 2 months from the previous defer date (May 1). Due Again works the same way, but with the due date.
- If you want to “snooze” the current action, you can click a button below the defer/due dates in the inspector:
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Great explanation @lizard thanks!
@lizard thanks for the clear explanation.
I have an event that I want to have due every Saturday. However, some weeks I’m not so on top of things and I don’t get to it until the Sunday 8 days later. Rather than using a ‘Due Again +1week’ which would make it due the Sunday after I completed it, is it possible to have it show up on the next available Saturday?
Concrete example:
Task is due Sat Apr 5, 2014.
I mark it complete Sun Apr 13, 2014.
I want it to show up again as due on Sat Apr 19, 2014.
@nall The closest you could get to that is a ‘repeat every’ and then mark it completed twice, or tweak the date of the new one by a week after it’s created.
Defer Another allows you to move the task start (earliest time you can start it) by the period - if you defer a task to Wednesday because you can’t begin it before then, then discover that you won’t be able to start it until Friday, you Defer Another 2 days. Think if is at “Change Start Date by …”
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think of Defer Another as a “snooze” at all. Instead, I think of it as, “I don’t need to think about this for at least [period]”. So, an example is changing the filter for our A/C at home. I like to change it every other month, but the filters we use can last a little longer than that. I have the task repeat with defer another 2 months, so that when I do get around to changing it (maybe 65 days), then the next repeat will have a defer date of 2 months from the time I completed it. In contrast, it’s not ever “due” in the strictest sense and if I take a little while extra to get to it, it shouldn’t come up again until 2 months from when I checked it off because there’s not actually anything to do about it until the filter has been used for a while.
