Maintenance type tasks

[derkork]

A lot of maintenance tasks (e.g. cleaning, sorting, plant watering, etc.) have behaviour that is somewhat fuzzy. These tasks occur somewhat regularly but they do not have a fixed due date. Their recurrence also depends on when they have been done before (if you just watered the plants it doesn't make sense to water them again right now and you cannot make up for missed sessions by just adding more water). One could write them like this:

• Sort incoming mail 🔃 3 days ✅ 2021-06-22

The 🔃 indicates the suggested interval (e.g. in this case 3 days). The ✅ indicates when the task was last completed. Tasks which have not been completed since the last completion time + suggested interval will be considered as active. Ideally one could sort these tasks by how many days they are over the suggested interval, so the tasks that have not been done in a long time should come up first.

[megclaypool]

I don't know how hard this would be to implement, but it would be useful for me 😀 +1

[schemar]

Thank you for the idea. This is definitely related to #53. what would you say are the main differences? Thanks!

[megclaypool]

Let's see... #53:

It should be possible to base the next recurrence of an event on the time it was done

And this ticket is:

Their recurrence also depends on when they have been done before

Looks pretty directly related 😀
For me, I don't think there's a difference as far as event recurrence. I think @derkork was also suggesting some kind of query sorting based on how overdue a recurring task is, but maybe (s)he can clarify?

[derkork]

Yep. It is actually very similar. The idea is that these tasks sort of raise in priority the longer you don't do them. But I guess this can also be done with some clever sorting method and doesn't need an extra task type. So if you have the basis from #53 and some ordering by e.g. "days overdue desc" or something this should do the trick.

[schemar]

There is also a ticket about sorting somewhere 😅 So this should all line up eventually. Thank you for your input!

[claremacrae]

The when done option was released in version 1.5.0.

The docs are at: Repeating a Task Based on the Original Due Date or the Completion Date.

A general tip for smooth operation is to ensure that your unit of recurrence is a fixed duration, namely days or weeks - and not months (28/29/30/31) or years (leap years).

So every 30 days when done is safer than every month when done, for example.