How to make a task repeat

Weekly stock counts, month-end reconciliations and the Monday production call are the same job on a rhythm. A repeating task creates itself on that rhythm, so nobody has to remember to raise it. This starts from the due-date calendar covered in How to edit a task.

Before you start

Setting up and editing schedules is usually a lead's job rather than every member's. If the Recurring section is absent from a department, that is what it means.

How do you set one up?

Open the due-date calendar on a task, either while creating it or from its panel, and turn on Repeats inside that calendar. Repeating belongs to the date rather than being a field of its own, which is why it lives there.

Then choose the rhythm:

• Daily, Weekly or Monthly, with an Interval from 1 to 52, which is what makes "every 2 weeks" possible.
• For weekly, pick which weekdays it lands on with the Mon to Sun toggles. At least one has to be on.
• For monthly, pick a day of the month from 1 to 31.

The closed control reads the rhythm back in plain English, for example "Every 2 weeks", so you can check it at a glance.

A schedule needs a date to start from. If you have not set one, the calendar asks you to pick a date to start the schedule.

When do the tasks actually appear?

On a fifteen-minute cycle rather than the instant you save. If you set up a schedule and no task appears immediately, nothing has gone wrong: wait for the next cycle.

Tasks arrive at 09:00 in the schedule's own timezone unless you set a due time, in which case they use that.

Each task the schedule produces is an ordinary task. Edit it, reassign it, comment on it and complete it exactly as any other, and doing so has no effect on the schedule or on the next occurrence.

What is the difference between a schedule and its tasks?

The schedule is the template. The tasks it produces are separate, individually editable things.

Rescheduling one occurrence to Thursday does not move the series. That is what you want when one week is unusual, and it is the thing people expect to work the other way.

To change the rhythm itself, edit the schedule rather than a task.

Where do you manage a schedule?

Open the department, where a Recurring section lists every schedule that team has. Each row shows its rhythm in plain English, the date it next runs, and buttons to Edit, Pause and Resume.

Edit covers the title, the due time, the next run date, the frequency, the interval and the weekdays. Editing sends every field at once, so a control you clear is genuinely cleared. Read the whole form before saving.

How do you stop one without losing its history?

Pause it. A paused schedule stops producing tasks and keeps its rule, its history and every task it has already made.

Switching Repeats off from a task panel does the same thing: it pauses the series rather than destroying it. Resume picks it up again.

If a schedule ever hits a problem, it pauses itself rather than letting the fault spread to the other schedules in the workspace. Its row is where you would see that.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on one

Turning Repeats on from a task that already exists starts the schedule at the next matching slot after that task's own date, so today's task is never duplicated.

And a schedule carries no attachments, because a file belongs to one occurrence rather than to the series. Add files to the individual task once it appears, per How to add files and comments to a task.