Zombie tasks coming back to life

I've been using GoodTasks under iPadOS 13.4 on my iPad Mini 4 for a few days now and have noticed something odd. I tend to spend most of my time in GoodTasks in the Today list with it showing a list of tasks interspersed with Calendar entries, which is one of the big reasons I decided to try GoodTasks.

I have a number of tasks that are set to repeat daily with the Repeat After Completion option unchecked and End Repeat set to None, and I've noticed that several of them, after I check them off and they disappear from view, show up again as unchecked later that day. Not the same ones and not from any one particular List, and not every day, but If I check the log of completed items for the day I'll find that they are listed as having been checked off at what is, as far as I can remember, the appropriate time, and yet here they are showing up unchecked (and with the original time in place) on the same day despite GoodTasks having logged them as having been checked off once already that day. If I look in the Recently Completed smart list later in the day after I've gone through the whole checked them off/noticed them reappearing/checked them off again, they show up in the list twice, each time logged as being checked off at the time I did check them off. It's good that they're logged twice (assuring me that this isn't early onset Alzheimer's setting in) but as I understand it this isn't what's supposed to happen.

The big question is, what's making tasks reappear a bit later that same day when I definitely have them set to recur daily? A conflict with another app accessing the Reminders database? A syncing issue?

For the record: yes, iCloud Sync is turned on within GoodTasks and all the different Include options are checked. I have no other devices using iCloud to Sync with - I very occasionally access the Reminders app via the web interface, but don't use the web interface to check/uncheck reminders. I have several other apps on my iPad which I've used, at various points in the past, to access the Reminders database but for the last few days since I started using GoodTasks I haven't made use of them so I can't see any good reason why they should still be accessing the Reminders database behind my back, let alone changing the checked/unchecked status of Reminders entries.

Any thoughts about what I need to look into next? In particular, is there any way to confirm whether another App has been accessing the Reminders database and checking/unchecking entries behind my back, or any option I can turn on to either stop other Apps from messing with Reminders entries or at least log that that's potentially causing the problem? (I have a distinct feeling that the sand boxing of apps makes that a non-starter, but I thought I'd ask.)

[I'm thoroughly aware that it's quite possible that I've just misunderstood how GoodTask is supposed to work, but if that's so then I'd prefer to ask a dumb question early on and find out for sure rather than spend weeks going off on a tangent when the answer is staring me in the face. Be gentle with me…]

Hi @thebeard, thanks for using GoodTask.

Since the completed task seems to be showing properly, task itself and the completing process must have gone right.

Now the question is about the showing task. I see that you're talking about recurring task. Would you give me below info?

  • Do you see 2 tasks? Normally if it's recurring task, new one has recurrence option with next date. With daily recurring task, it should normally have due date for tomorrow and recurring option set. Check if you have another one for today without recurrence rule.

  • If you have one but the due date is set to today rather than tomorrow, please send me the recurrence rule for that task and how you complete the task.

Thanks!

Earlier this morning I checked off 3 tasks which are set to recur daily on weekdays, and within an hour two of them were back as unchecked tasks. (Just to note one minor point, I should have made it clearer that many of my tasks repeat daily, but not on every weekday. Several of them are set to repeat on each weekday but my intention is that they'll skip weekends, or that there's another instance that uses the same wording at weekends but are set to a different time of day because my weekend (more to the point, my non-workday) schedule demands reminders at different times. I do hope that my failure to make this clearer in my initial post doesn't prompt cries of "Oh, if you'd said that in the first place then we'd have realised it was X that causes that. Just stop doing X and Y and you'll be fine!")

Anyway, a concrete example:

I had a recurring task on weekdays that I checked off (and which was listed in the Completed section as follows)

Meanwhile, another instance of said task is listed as a task for today (even though I checked it off by checking the toggle against that task at 04:01, hours before I took these screen dumps)

The details of that task are as follows

I see only one task, but it's listed under both the current and the Completed lists. If the available task was listed against the next day in the sequence (which should be Monday, given that it's meant to be recurring every weekday) then I'd be fine with it, but it showing up on the same day is weird. [Thinks: could it be that the issue is that I checked it off at 4:01 so instead of advancing to the next weekday it's advancing to the same time I originally asked for? Could it really be that simple, that I'm not expected to check off a task before it's due?]

Thanks for details.

Time shouldn’t matter. Would you make a test task and run it to see how it goes?

If issue persists, let me know detail recurring option set on that task.

It’s hard to figure out since I can’t reproduce it on my side. If you figure out how to reproduce it, it’ll be helpful to fix the issue.

Thanks!

So, I ran a test (actually, two tests because I decided to try to see whether it made a difference whether I checked off a task before or after the scheduled time. I realise you indicated that time didn't matter, but I couldn't see the harm.)

I set up the two tasks in GoodTask as daily repeats...

One of them I checked off before it was due, and one of them I only checked off after it was overdue.

Both items worked perfectly, with no zombie tendencies showing themselves.

For what it's worth, looking for them in Reminders itself confirmed that they were now set up to repeat tomorrow.

The big question is, what does this tell us? Unfortunately so far today there have been no new instances of zombie tasks returning to haunt me, but that seems to be the nature of this problem: it's very much an intermittent failure, so my normal tasks work (what I think of as) normally most of the time. (For what it's worth, there's not obviously a common factor to them - different lists, different times.) It feels to me as if some background task is failing intermittently and causing the last couple of checked-off tasks to arise, zombie-like, from the dead. Any other ideas for tests I can run to get to the bottom of this? Any way to measure/document what might be failing intermittently?

Thanks for details. It seems like a weird situation.

  • what service do you use to manage Reminders data? (i.e iCloud, Exchange, etc)

  • how many completed tasks do you have? (You can check by tapping more button on All lists - List view)

Thanks!

I use iCloud to hold Reminders data, and as of this morning I have 3,651 completed tasks.

An interesting development today. I left those two test tasks on daily repeats, and as was the case on the first day I made a point of checking one of them off before it was due and the other after it was due. The first one (checked off before the due date/time) was correctly checked off as normal, but today the second test (deliberately checked off after the due time) initially took the checking-off as normal, but then later in the day it showed up again as unchecked.

After I checked it off a second time, here's what it currently look like in GoodTasks...

... and this is how it looks in Reminders...

I've just realised that in Reminders the first of those two test tasks (the one that I thought was checked off successfully as normal earlier today) is listed as unchecked/still waiting to be checked off today, contrary to what GoodTasks thinks:

Any thoughts about what this signifies about the state of my Reminders database? Is the real issue that my Reminders database is so badly corrupted that I should just give up on it and go and find a different, proprietary solution that stays well away from Reminders?

Hi @thebeard, thanks for the details. Since I can't test it on my hand, it's hard to acknowledge details about how it's working on GoodTask and Reminders.

I recommend you to uncheck some lists that have lots of completed tasks in 'Settings - Lists & Calendars' and make new lists to use in replace of them. Having thousands of completed tasks can make some performance issues and this could possibly be one of them.

I'm checking to improve this on future updates. Thanks!