Suggestion: skipping instances of recurrent tasks during a certain period

[FilSalustri]

I propose that a new pair of dates be added, which define a period during which a given task's recurrences are "skipped" over.

I have a number of tasks that I perform regularly, but only for a certain repeating period each year/semester/month.

A couple of examples:

1. each summer (May-Aug), I do certain housework tasks every 2 weeks;
2. my dog must take her tick meds once a month, but only from March to November; and
3. in my teaching, there are certain tasks that I do only on Mondays in fall semesters, on Fridays in winter semesters, and not at all during summer semesters.

If there were a "skip period" defined by a start and end date, I could implement these as:

1. set the housework task to recur every 2 weeks, and have a skip period of 1 Sep to 30 Apr;
2. set the tick meds task to recur every month, with a skip period of 1 Dec to 28 Feb; and
3. set up a task that starts and is due every Monday, but skipping the period 1 Jan to 31 Aug; and a task that starts and is due every Friday, skipping the period from 1 May to 31 Dec.

Alternatively, this skipping could also be implemented if the Scheduled date could recur at a different rate than the start/end date.

In this case, I could implement case 1 above as: set the housework task to start 1 May, due 30 Aug, with an annual recurrence; then set the Scheduled date to be 1 May, recurring every 2 weeks.

I suspect letting the Scheduled date recur at a different rate than start/due dates would be harder to implement than just adding a skip period. But I do think this would be a generally useful feature.

[claremacrae]

Thank you for the suggestion @FilSalustri.

[claremacrae]

These are the existing Recurrence feature requests in Discussions, sorted by votes

And these are the Feature and Bug issues for recurrence:

The Votes count on Issues is less useful, as it's less obvious and I haven't documented the value of adding a 👍 .

Any chance of this getting implemented?

Realistically, I would have to say that the chances are quite low.

If anyone came forward offering to work on the Recurrence code, I would point them to issues that are more widely requested and more widely useful.

[FilSalustri]

Fair enough. I didn't see anything in other issues/discussions that I believed mapped to my suggestion, but you're the boss.
Thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed response anyways.

[claremacrae]

Sorry I was unclear. It wasn’t about whether anything mapped to your suggestion.

It was about the sheer weight of so many requests for volunteer time on this plugin, even in this one topic of recurrence.

We are never going to be able to do all the requests, even if we wanted to do all of them.

[claremacrae]

And the fact that as this issue still only has zero votes after two years means it is not going to be a widely used feature, which is a factor in prioritisation.

[FilSalustri]

Again, I totally get it. Thanks for all your work on one of the best plugins ever for Obsidian.