Repeating tasks and reminders
A monthly review that turns up on the first. A filter that needs changing three days after you last changed it. Both are tasks that come back, and both work the same way whether the task is a card on a board or a row on a checklist.
Setting one up
On a board: open a card and choose Repeats on its panel.
On a checklist: select a row and press r, or open the row's note and choose Repeats….
Either way, a note's Settings page lists everything that repeats in it, which is the place to look when you cannot remember what you set up.
You are then asked one question that matters, and it is deliberately not a "repeat" tick-box, because the two answers are different promises:
| Choice | Means | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| On a schedule | Every so often, whatever happens. A month nobody did it is a month that was missed, and it comes back anyway. | A monthly review, rent, a quarterly return. |
| After it is done | A set time after the last one was finished. Nothing is waiting for you while one is still open. | Servicing something, watering something, a follow-up. |
How often, exactly
On a schedule, a repeat is built from patterns. Each one is a sentence — every 2 weeks on Monday, every month on the third Monday — and between them they cover the things people actually ask for:
| What you want | How you say it |
|---|---|
| Every other Monday | Every 2 weeks, with Mon ticked. |
| Every weekday | Every 1 week, with Mon to Fri ticked. |
| The 3rd Monday of the month | Every 1 month, on the third Monday. |
| The last working day of the month | Every 1 month, on the last weekday — which is a different date each month, and is the one most calendars cannot express at all. |
| The last day of the month | Every 1 month, on the last day. |
| The 1st and the 15th | Two patterns: Add another pattern. |
| Every year on 14 March | Every 1 year, in March, on day 14. |
| The first Monday of March, every year | Every 1 year, in March, on the first Monday. |
| The second-to-last Friday of the month | Every 1 month, on the second to last Friday — ordinals count from either end. |
Anything you add fires as well as the others. "The first Monday" and "the third Monday" are two patterns on one repeat, and a day they both name brings one task rather than two.
The months a day does not have
A day no year has — the 30th of February, the 31st of April — is refused when you choose it rather than saved and found silent. The 29th of February is not one of those: it is allowed, and comes round roughly every four years, which the next dates will show you.
If you ask for the 31st, a month without a 31st is skipped — February simply does not get one. This is what the calendar standard requires, and it is more honest than quietly moving it to the 28th, which would be a different promise from the one you made. If the end of the month is what you meant, choose the last day: that lands on the 28th, the 29th, the 30th or the 31st, as the month has it.
Where it stops
Never, on a date, or after a number of times. A count is spent across the whole repeat rather than by each pattern: "after 10 times" means ten tasks, however many patterns made them.
The page shows the next three dates before you save, worked out by the same code that will make them — so what you are shown is what will happen.
Moving one of them
Every date on a repeat's page can be moved, and there are two answers because they are two different questions:
| Choice | Means |
|---|---|
| Move just this one | That one date happens somewhere else. The rule is untouched and everything after it is exactly where it was. |
| Move this and following | The repeat splits in two: the old rule ends the day before, and a new one carries on from the date you moved to. What was made before stays where it is. |
A split takes its days from the day you moved to, because that is what you moved: a Monday series dragged to a Friday repeats on Fridays, and one on the 3rd of the month moved to the 10th repeats on the 10th. A rule counted from the end of the month stays counted from the end — "the last Monday" moved to another last weekday is still the last, which in a month with five of them is a different day from the fourth. The new rule is shown in words before you commit to it.
Reminders
A repeat can remind you on the day each one is due. Anything else can remind you too, once: open a card or a checklist row and choose Remind me…. It does not have to repeat to do that.
A reminder is yours. It reaches your inbox and nobody else's, at the time you chose in your own time zone — so nine in the morning is nine in the morning in March and in July alike. Because it changes nothing anybody else can see, you only need to be able to read something to be reminded about it: a colleague with read-only access to a board can still ask to be told on Thursday. Two people can each be waiting to be told about the same card, and neither can see or move the other's.
You get one reminder per thing. Asking again moves the one that is waiting rather than adding a second, and you can turn it off from the same page. When it arrives you can put it off by three hours or until tomorrow morning, which moves that same reminder rather than making another.
A repeat's reminder works the same way and goes to whoever set the repeat up. A checklist row has no assignee, and sending somebody a reminder they never asked for is how an inbox becomes something people stop reading.
From a program
A key that may write in a note may also say what repeats in it — read them, make one, change the rule, pause it, stop it. A read-only key keeps reading what repeats and cannot set one.
Programs are given the standard rather than this page's
vocabulary: a rule is an RFC 5545 RRULE string, the same thing
every calendar exchanges, so a rule you already have can be handed over
unchanged.
POST /api/v1/w/<workspace>/notes/<note>/repeats
{ "card_id": 12, "patterns": ["FREQ=WEEKLY;INTERVAL=2;BYDAY=MO"] }Give several patterns and it comes back on any of them. Rules outside what this application writes are refused rather than stored, and so is a day no year has. Claude can do all of this too, through the repeats tool.
When the next one appears
On the day it is due, not the moment you finish the last one. A board stays as short as the work actually in front of you, and a checklist row simply turns up on the morning it matters. A card also gets that day as its due date, so overdue and today keep working.
Days are counted in the workspace's own time zone, because a repeating task is usually shared — one that fell on different days for different readers would be two tasks.
What comes back
- A card returns to the column it was made in. If that column has since been deleted, it goes to the first one, and the page says so.
- A checklist row returns with everything under it, unticked — a routine is the row and its steps, and bringing back the row alone would lose the routine.
- Your edits carry forward. Change the wording of this month's, and next month's arrives with the new wording.
- Nothing about being done carries forward. The new one is not ticked, not assigned to anybody, and carries no dates from the last one.
Missing a few
If a monthly task went three months without anybody doing it, all three come back — one for each date, so what was missed is visible rather than quietly forgotten.
There is a limit of twelve at once. If a daily task has been left for a year, you get the twelve most recent and the page tells you how many were too old to bring back. A wall of three hundred identical cards helps nobody, and losing them silently would be worse.
Pausing, skipping, stopping
- Pause — nothing new until you start it again.
- Skip the next one — that date is used up, and the one after it still comes.
- Stop repeating — everything it has already made stays exactly where it is. Those are what was done, and they are the history.
A repeating task also stops on its own if whoever set it up loses the right to write in that note, and it says so on its page. It is a standing instruction to write somewhere, and it should not outlive the permission that allowed it.
What is not built
- Due dates on checklist rows. A row appearing on the day is the signal a date would have carried.
- Rules typed in prose, like "every second Tuesday". You can say that — it is every 2 weeks with Tue ticked — but you choose it rather than type it, so what you set is what you can predict.