Postponing recurring tasks

Support
#1

I have many recurring tasks (daily, weekly, etc.) and sometimes need to postpone one of them and don't see a way to do that as I would like. For example, every three days I have a 9:00 AM task to run a clone operation on my computer disk. Then say that today I'm busy and need to postpone that until 2:00 PM, so I use a quick action to reset the time to 2:00. Very simple in GoodTask! Unfortunately, that also resets all future clone reminders to 2:00 as well, and I have to then reset them back to 9:00 after today's task is complete because that is my preferred time for doing it.

Changing a recurring item in Fantastical brings up an option to either 1) change only that single occurrence 2) change all future occurrences as well. Is there such an option in GoodTask to change only the current task? The feature set is so deep that I haven't found it yet.

Great programs on both iOS and macOS!!

Thanks!!

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#2

Hi @brudderman, thanks for the feedback.

Currently only way is to do the action you've said is to snooze when notification comes in. When you snooze on a notification, it'll alert you after snoozed time but next recurring task should be made on original set time.

Recurring tasks are a bit tricky and I'll keep in mind about this to see if I can improve it in the future.

Thanks!

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#3

Thanks for getting back with me so soon! Snoozing as suggested is a partial solution, and I often do just that. In the mornings, however, I usually look at all the tasks for the day and either drag/drop them to other time slots or else use a quick action to adjust the times as needed for the best daily workflow, so all of that is done before a notification ever comes in. Probably the quickest thing for me to do now would be just to click the recurring reminder as complete and use Siri to create another "one time" reminder for the same task at the new time. But that's a bit clunky and inefficient. With Fantastical it almost seems as if any adjustment to a recurring event can, with the selection to do so, somehow seamlessly makes the current "visible" instance into a "one time" event while leaving the future recurring instances intact.

I appreciate your considering better approaches and hope that you can come up with a way to do it. Would be a great timesaver for me!

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#4

The easiest way currently is probably to duplicate the recurring task (with a quick action), then adjust one copy and remove its recurrence, then complete the other copy.

#5

Thanks, Larry! I’ll experiment. There may also be some options with the enhanced Siri shortcuts in iOS 13, but I haven’t looked at those yet.

#6

I'm wondering if any improvements have been made here with the deferral of recurring tasks. Changing a recurring item in Fantastical brings up an option to either 1) change only that single occurrence or 2) change all future occurrences as well. In GoodTask changing a recurring item also changes all future occurrences even though most of the time I don't want that to happen. A more efficient way to accomplish this without having to make other manual adjustments would be appreciated, but perhaps a setting for that has been added that I have missed.

Thanks!

#7

Hi @brudderman, thanks for the feedback. The option you see on Fantastical is probably calendar event which behaves differently with Reminders app's tasks.

On tasks inside GoodTask, if you set recurring options specifically, it should behave a bit better. For example, if you set it to repeat every Monday rather than every week, even if you defer a task for a day to Tuesday, next one will come in Monday. For monthly tasks, setting exact date will do similar work.

I'll keep your feedback. Thanks!

#8

Thanks for getting back with me so quickly. Yes, the option in Fantastical is for calendar events rather than tasks. I'll have a look at my recurring tasks and see which of them might be set specifically as you suggest.

#9

@GoodTask Would this work?

Create a template for the action
Automate running the template on a certain schedule
This way each task created from the template + automation is its own independent task.

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#10

Hi @debryc, thanks for the suggestion.

Yes, if you make a template and run it on automation on certain schedule, it should be made according to the recurrence rule.

Thanks!

1 Like