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Repeating tasks are useful for things you do on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis that you want to schedule in your calendar.
If you want a quick overview, check out this video. For a more in-depth guide, keep reading!
Create a new repeating task
Add a new task in your inbox, or within a project. You can also hit T on your keyboard to create a new task. Go to the Repeating tab:
From here, type the name of your task. Then for the look for the repeating tasks options. We've included some preset values here for common timeframes like:
Every weekday
Once a week, due Friday
Every week on a certain day
Monthly on a certain day
Monthly, due at the end of the month
Annually on a certain day
If you want to customize your repeating task, choose "Custom..." and you'll see something that looks like this:
Let's go through these options. Note that different options will appear depending on whether the task is repeating weekly, monthly, etc.
Repeat
This is the frequency for how often you want the task to repeat.
Daily means every day, every 3 days, every 14 days, etc.
Weekly means the tasks will repeat on whichever days you choose, every week. Or every 2 weeks, or every 26 weeks, etc. For example, say you need to do a certain task on Mondays and Wednesdays but only every two weeks. You'd enter Weekly, every 2 weeks, then week 1 will have a task scheduled on Monday and another one on Wednesday. Week 2 will have no tasks scheduled. Week 3 will again have the tasks on Monday and Wednesday, etc.
As opposed to weekly, once per week means the task schedules once each week, but that task will have the flexibility to be scheduled between days of the week. For example, say you need to complete a task by Friday each week, but you can start working on it on Wednesday. With the 'once a week' option, TimeHero will schedule each task sometime between Wednesday and Friday each week, making sure you get it done by the end of the day on Friday.
Monthly means your task will repeat once a month, or every two months, or five months, etc. – you'll get to pick the range of the dates the task can schedule in.
And finally, yearly means the task will repeat once per year, scheduled automatically between the dates you pick.
Start planning/Due
Some frequency options (once a week, monthly and yearly) let you choose a start and due date.
These dates set the range in which TimeHero will automatically schedule the task. For example, if you set the start date on a monthly repeating task to the first day of the month, and the due date to the last day of the month, TimeHero will schedule the task at some point between these dates (usually earliest date it finds in your schedule where you have time to work on it). This gives the task the flexibility to move and be rescheduled in case other meetings or higher priority tasks come up.
You can also set the due date to be relative to the start date, e.g. 2 days after the start date of the task.
Note that this is different to a task's work estimate, which is the amount of time you estimate a task will take to complete. If your work estimate is 2 hours, TimeHero will look for when you have 2 hours free. It will then compare this task to other tasks you have, and schedule this tasks in your calendar for a 2-hour block at some point between the start date and the due date.
Expires
This option lets you choose what happens to a task when it passes its due date. For example, say you have a task "Daily report" that repeats daily. One day, you don't get a chance to complete it. You probably don't want to have two "Daily report" tasks scheduled the next day! So in this case, you'd set this repeating task to expire after its due date, and make sure the due date is set to "same day". Like this:
So what you're telling TimeHero is to plan a task every day, make it due the same day, and don't reschedule it past that day. The task will stay scheduled in your calendar, but won't move past the due date. It will show as "Expired" – meaning that you didn't get to complete the task and won't be completing it in the future.
On the other hand, if you have a task "Client outreach" that repeats once a week, and you miss completing it one week, you might want to do double the work next week to make up for it. In this case, you'd set this repeating task to never expire:
And you'd end up with two "Client outreach" tasks scheduled in the next week:
End repeat
This is simply when you'd like the repeating task to end. In TimeHero, because we actually schedule the work you need to do in your calendar, it's important for us to have an end date so that we can limit the amount of data our scheduling engine needs to crunch when you make any changes.
Seeing your repeating tasks
You can see repeating tasks in your calendar:
Or in the Recurrences tab in the task details pane when you open a task:
From either of these places, you can see the status of each task and complete them.
Change a task to repeating, or edit repeating options
If you have an existing task you've already created and want to make it repeat, or if you want to change the options for a repeating task, click the task to open it and use the Repeats option:
Note: the task must not be split, and must not have any work logged.