Any tips on how to accomplish this in iCal? Entourage is verboten in our college. I also can’t justify dropping 30 bucks on Consistency. It’s good, but doesn’t integrate with iCal, doesn’t hide in the menu and doesn’t save files automatically (like the wonderful notational velocity does).

That’s a good question, Anthony. I’m not aware of any way for iCal to do that, unfortunately. :(

Sorry to hear The Man has you hamstrung. I wonder if other folks seeing this might recommend apps that could work for you?

(In other news: Man, is iCal ever due for a serious update.)

I use Outlook 2003 and that’s typically the same way I do. Works perfectly…

Life Balance does this type of recurring really well too, as you can set tasks to occur “routinely” and you then enter the amount of time between each occurrence. It also creates the next task for you automatically. If you have a palm that syncs with your Life Balance, you can have it export the tasks to your todo, which will then sync with iCal tasks, and any task you input in LB for a date (hard landscape) it exports to the calendar, which also syncs into iCal. It’s a little bit obtuse, but should work. I just use LB for task management now, though, but having the calendar stuff sync is nice. And yes, iCal is in serious need of updating.

Another way to handle recurring tasks involves, well, 43 folders. :)

You might as well schedele your MBV tasks in YEARS, not days..

Oh, that’s nice … and I prolly would’ve missed it coming from outlook on the PC, so thanks.

I’m finding great success with a mostly paper-based GTD hack, but this has me thinking about re-examining the electronic route. If only there was a way to reliably sync between Outlook/PC at work and Entourage/Mac at home.

Just to add to David’s comment about Life Balance’s excellent “Routine” task, it also allows a “lead time” which governs how the routine task shows up in the task list. At twice the lead time it will appear at a low priority. The task will slowly move up the list until 1x the lead time, at which point the task is as high of a priority it can be, given the other tasks on the list. For example, something that needs done every week can have a lead time of 1 day, which means at TWO days (2x lead time) before the task would be “due” it shows up on the list, as a subtle reminder. At one day (1x lead time) it’s as high on the list as it can get. Pretty cool; Life Balance takes some getting used to and is kinda high maintenance, but it is very good at what it does.

I need to look at Life Balance again. Like Tinderbox, it’s one of those apps that seems really excellent but has a bit of a curve to getting started.

Thanks for these, everybody.

In iCal, if you schedule an event on the calendar, rather than making it a Todo item, you can set up intervals. If you’re late completing a task, just move the most recent item to the current day. iCal will ask you if you want to move just that one, or all the events… choose “All”, and the events will be shifted.

Heh - I especially loved the comment about My Bloody Valentine. Kevin Shields - needs a swift kick and should be forced to read GTD :-)

I set up a “My Bloody Valentine” news alert on Google for that second note. Last I heard, it’s set for a end-of-the-year timeframe.

Maybe I am missing the point, but……..

I played around with recurring tasks in a number of (non-Mac) apps on my PC and PDA. In the end, I’ve found the simplest method is to set the date, and then when you’ve done the task, simply reset the due date.

The task doesn’t get marked as done, but I’ve retrained myself to see the changing of a date as a completion, and it gives me the same level of personal achievement.

This is a simple “hack” and allows me to make a decision about whether I want to set the new date based on a time interval from when I complete or when the original was actually due….

If it weren’t for this post, I never would have realized how many things I do that require this kind of scheduling. Then I realized that Outlook would track it for me in this way (it bugs me that I can’t do it on my Palm, but as long as Outlook is generating the correct todo, that’s okay).

Yes, Life Balance handles recurring tasks very well and it’s the one thing that I don’t like the way I’m handling with my emacs/gtd setup which I think I’m making some good modifications to. But I’d really just rather be using Life Balance. Unfortunately (and this is my guess as to why the hacking-inclined set stays away from it, too) it is very difficult to get data in or out of lifebalance without being tied to its somewhat cumbersome GUI. I think if it were to get applescript support it would probably be the best solution around for GTD.

John, while you’re right that the PDA itself can’t do this, it does turn out that the Palm Desktop software (at least on PC) does as well.

With iCal, you could in theory create the recurring task as an all-day event and then set it to repeat at certain intervals (as another reader explained above). Unfortunately, if you don’t finish the task until say two days after an interval, there’s no one-touch way to then shift the intervals forward. It’s that single-click ability to reset the intervals that makes it truly useful — a tiny user interface detail that makes all the difference.

Oh well. I wish iCal did have this, because I prefer it to Entourage’s calendar/task module. It needs a serious update, though.

On the other hand, the recurring task is a vehicle for potentially dramatic forms of procrastination. I bet Kevin Shields has a recurring task that pops up every month that says, “Finish new album.” Look where that got him!

re: recurring task in iCal: can you trigger an Applescript on a particular task being completed? Then the applescript could just insert a new todo on a particular interval.

There is a nice windows app (yikes) that I have started liking called ATnotes that has the recurring feature: http://atnotes.fr.st/

I like recurring tasks, but I want to be able to say when they will appear on my list. I use Outlook and I want a task to appear on my list, for example, a day before its due date, and not before. Otherwise, I get blind to it and get used to seeing tasks on my todo list that I know to ignore. I’ve thought about adding filters for this, but that would almost certainly require giving everything a due date and lots of my tasks are too vague for that.

pyGTD (http://96db.com/pyGTD/) does this too. The way it handles recurring tasks feels a lot like LifeBalance…recurrence and lead-time independently specified in days, weeks, months, or years. The recurrence can either be on a fixed schedule (e.g., every Monday), or a fixed interval after each completion. I use this functionality for Daily and Weekly Reviews, as well as various random things for which I need periodic nagging.

Lucas, I believe it is possible to reschedule a todo or event via applescript. Take a look at the ical applescript dictionary here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103146/Stories/iCal.html

Of course, now I have to learn applescript. Ah well, time to add ‘Applescript the definitive guide’ to my list of books to read.

I was just about to say, “but that would require my using a Microsoft product on my computer, and I refuse.”

At this point, my powerbook screen began to flicker, and now appears to be dead. So I’m typing on a PC, using Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word, in Windows.

My God. I had no idea Mr. Gates had this kind of control over the universe.

I had no idea that Outlook 2003 had this feature (I’m chained to Windows), but I found it after seeing the reference to Entourage. Thanks for pointing this out. Now I’ll get the satisfaction of having checked it off and get a new one for free. Outstanding. I might have to actually read some Outlook documentation.

I have the same issue as Jemima. Using recurring tasks in Entourage puts the task right back on my list after I’ve completed it. Sure it’s nice that it automatically appears, but having it sitting there for a week, a month or a year before it actually recurrs seems to make things messier than they need to be.

Am I missing something?

Sure it’s nice that it automatically appears, but having it sitting there for a week, a month or a year before it actually recurrs seems to make things messier than they need to be.

I get around this “feature” via a series of custom views. There’s a longer post coming soon about this (hopefully tomorrow), but here’s one easy one:

• Tasks only
• All folders
• Criteria (unless ANY criteria are):
  • Due date > 1 day from now
  • Is Complete
  • Category is “someday/maybe”
  • Priority is Low
  • Priority is Lowest

Gives you a dashboard view of all the important current stuff on your radar screen.

You can do this easily enough with a tickler system, where each task simply has the duration attached. Whenever you’re done you have to set up the next appointment for it before you check it off. If you take this approach, you can implement recurrence in any software, as long as you’re responsible for the recurrance.

A pain? Perhaps? But I like knowing that I set it again, b/c it validates that I don’t have to do it again for X time units, reminds me that it will have to be done on that time, and it a bit more satisfying than just checking something off (Ha! I don’t have to dust for another 5 days! And then it will take me only 15 minutes!)

That said, I’m not very good with such tasks …

[And I’m on a PC. I can do recurrence pretty well on my Covey-Franklin electronic organizer, buggy as it is]

john & chris you both are wrong in thinking th e standard palm os setup cannot handle recurring tasks. it can.

in the tasks application’s task details requester give a todo item a due date. then some additional options appear. choose ‘repeat’, choose ‘other’. a requester ‘change repeat’ will appear on screen. choose an interval and change the preset option from ‘fixed scheduloe’ to ‘after completed’. and there you are.

it works that way on my palm os 5 machine…

Thanks Merlin, I’m going to play around with that. Looking forward to the longer piece

life balance is useless on some levels, what the world really needs is a good all in one productivity application not another app to use on top of the already apps using daily. We need balance in our technology and as for life well that’s an entirely different subject. Perhaps life balance should be designed more for monitoring our thoughts and dreams about life and let the Email/task management take care of the rest.