I use Omnifocus for my task manager which I think is brilliant for projects and one off things that crop up.
However I have four areas of life (work, home, church & personal) where I have a list of tasks that I need to do every week or month. These are the same each week / month, but there are quite a lot, so I do need reminding and I do need to be able to tick them off.
My problem is that these tasks clog up my Omnifocus to the extent that I can’t see the wood for the trees. When I tried recently removing all of these regular tasks, suddenly OF worked in the way it did when I first started using it.
So, the question is - Is there a good and easy system on mac and ios that I could use for keeping track of those weelky or monthly tasks. So I can just tick them off, but then next week they will show up again.
I really need to free up OF for what it’s good at as I am currently swamped.
I had this same problem. The answer for me was perspectives. So, for each list or area of my life with a checklist of repeating tasks I create perspectives with appropriate tags. The tasks themselves are part of my “single action list, and repeat on completion at the specified interval. This is much easier than managing projects and it allows me to break things up in a much cleaner way.
You can set tasks to have scheduled due date or date & time, then set that to be repeating daily, weekly or some other custom interval. You can have separate lists too so you could break out each of those 4 areas to a separate list.
I use it as a prompt for everything from daily reminders for medication through to maintenance schedules for various items which might be on a 3 or 6 month cycle.
Perspectives, defer dates, and judicious flagging can all help here. I have plenty of these kinds of repeating projects and tasks — weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc. — and have found that I can manage them all in OmniFocus right along with everything else. OmniFocus is not perfect, but my advice would be to be sure you’re familiar with the depth of its capabilities before letting your system spread elsewhere.
I use recurring tasks, but only a very few of them.
Putting large quantities of recurring tasks into any task management software – even including Reminders – can result in “notification exhaustion”.
Much simpler is to have a plain text list in a file – or perhaps TaskPaper – that contains the relevant daily or weekly or monthly checklist. (Leaving the structure of the list up to the imagination.)
Then, have only one recurring task: “Check daily task list” that has that task list file attached.
I’d recommend Due here. I find Due is fantastic for when I need Tasks to come to me. I use Omnifocus for planning and when I go to decide what tasks to do next.
I use Due for a lot of repeating tasks, but it’s really most useful for things that need to be done at a specific time, rather than repeating tasks that could be done anytime during a particular day or week (or even month).
Not what you wanted to hear but I keep all of mine in Omnifocus. What I’ve done is I created a set of repeating task folders. One for weekly projects and one for monthly projects and then one for each quarter of the year for projects that can only start in a specific quarter. I also have a housekeeping one for the things I always forget to do or put off just to remind me to do them. The projecs have the appropriate repeat times set in Omnifocus and I have them all set to complete on last action so that I never have to do anything manually to get them to continue on. I set start dates for when the project needs to start but I don’t generally set any due dates on them.
I do not have anynotifications set for Omnifocus but I do use many varied contexts (tags) to filter the tasks to be done into the best tool or location where I need to do the actions in those projects.
Right now my existing system has been pretty stable in terms of these repeating tasks for about 3 years and there are 138 of those projects.
Key is to really spend the time to set them up properly, have them autocomplete, get the repeating correct and the start dates correct and then it flows very well.
Custom perspectives make all the difference in the world for this. Youc an set things up to see all sorts of special permutations that can realy help with the friction part of deciding what to get done next.