Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Ending your repeating tasks
Repeats can be very handy for regular tasks, but some tasks don’t need to go on and on indefinitely. This week’s tip comes from vdichev, who points out some instances where you can use “until” or “for X times” in your repeats. (See more details on our repeat format page.)
We all know how to create recurring tasks in Remember The Milk – after all, that’s one of the many things it’s good at. For instance:
• Take antibiotics *daily
• Car lease payment *every month
However, many of these recurring tasks have an end date where we have to stop doing them – and they have to stop repeating. For some of these tasks it’s not desirable to continue doing the task after this period has passed. It’s no fun taking medications longer than necessary. And honestly, who would want to pay more for a leased car or for a loan than they have to?
Of course, there are solutions for this, albeit complicated. For instance, some folks would create a task at the end of the period to manually delete the other task (or configure it to stop repeating). However, this is not fully automated and we would like to eliminate the possibility for human error.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to schedule a task to repeat until a given date. Remember The Milk’s recurrence format conforms to RFC 2445 – well, at least where it makes sense. And what you might not know is that you can set the recurrence string as:
• Take antibiotics *daily until 15 December
• Car lease payment *every month until 15 June
Now you should never be reminded for a task that is no longer valid. Stay healthy and don’t pay more than you have to!
Thanks for sharing this tip, vdichev! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.
