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.