With the release of beorg 2.9.0 you can now create and edit repeating tasks.
Monthly sales meeting? Weekly gardening? Daily jog?
Set tasks to repeat on daily, weekly, monthly or yearly intervals. Choose how a task gets updated when completed - whether the date should be increased from the task date or today. Repeating tasks are available to all users in this latest release.
Repeating tasks work a little differently than in some other task management apps. Rather than setting a task to repeat you add a repeat modifier to a date.
As you are probably aware beorg saves everything in a plain text format. Here is an example of a task as you would see it in a file:
* TODO Weekly review
SCHEDULED: <2019-01-21 Mon>
A repeat modifier can be added to a scheduled date, deadline or “show on” date. A weekly review, by definition, should be done weekly. Here is that same task with a repeat modifier:
* TODO Weekly review
SCHEDULED: <2019-01-21 Mon +1w>
beorg understands that the +1w means that the task should appear every Monday, starting on the 21st January. If you move through the weeks in your agenda you’ll see the task appear every single Monday.
Currently the task is in a TODO state. If you move the task into a done state, e.g. DONE, then beorg will update the scheduled date and set the state back to TODO.
beorg puts an easy to use UI in front of the plain text syntax. Here is what you’ll see in beorg:
Setting up a date to repeat is easy:
- Tap the Repeat button at the bottom of the date dialog
- Set how often and at what interval you want the date to repeat - e.g. every 3 weeks
- Define what happens to the date when the task is set to done. More about this in a moment!
There are some scenarios where you don’t want the repeat interval to be added to the date exactly. For example:
- You have a task to check something once a week. Initially you set this to happen on a Monday however one week you end up leaving it until Friday. When you set the task to done you actually want it to be a week later - so Friday would be the next date. In this case you can tell beorg that on completion the date should be “Today + 1 week”.
- A task to sort your newspapers and recycle hasn’t been done for a month as you’ve been on holiday. When you eventually get round to doing this task you want to make sure that the next date isn’t just the previous date + 1 week as that would be in the past. To cope with this you tell beorg that on completion the next date should be “Assigned date + at least 1 week”.
Repeating tasks are a powerful way to help organize your schedule. If you want to discuss with other users how repeating tasks are best used in beorg check out the beorg forum.
Please note, repeating tasks don’t yet support warning periods or org-habit style modifiers. These will be added in a future release.
