[Status: Not planned] Improve how Recurring tasks work

Jason, great to hear from you again! Thank you for posting, these suggestions are helpful, and I love how you structured the feedback :)

I would like to see this also, main reason I haven't signed up yet.

Hi @Kai, thanks for letting us know how important this functionality is for your team. I would love to hear more about your use case and how you use recurring tasks? 

To add to this suggestion, I would like to have the ability to see "x" number iterations of a recurring task when using filters. For example, I might want to see all instances of a recurring task for "this week" or simply the "next 3" scheduled. The biggest keys are to avoid the overwhelming monster Jason describes, but also avoid hiding iterations of the task that are relevant to my current schedule.

Phillip, this is a fantastic idea! I can see how filtering recurring tasks would be useful, thanks for sharing your suggestion here.

There are many daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/Annual tasks that I need to perform.  It would be a great time saver and stress reliever to know these are repeated automatically.  Being able to schedule at a specific time of day, would be a plus.

One use case is for our warehouse to be assigned repeated daily tasks: (Mon-Fri)

Some Warehouse tasks would look like:
-Prepare Website orders for import into our Order Management Software.
-Import Website orders into Order Management Software and Print Packaging slips
-Pick, Pack and Ship Orders
-Create Postage Pickup Record (SCAN form)
-Restock Packaging supplies

Another use case is for Administrative and HR tasks, such as scheduling Monthly and Quarterly Tax Filings, Employee Reviews, Reports etc.. I have dozens of monthly, quarterly and annual Reports/tasks that repeat.  Having duplicated tasks makes managing everything more difficult, especially once you add a lot of repeated tasks.  Also, I can only schedule 60 occurrences right now, this means that I have to keep checking and updating the tasks.  Lastly, we would need to have a tasks "subtasks" duplicated when duplicating the parent task.

Kai, this is a great explanation! Thanks for including the additional information here, I think this is really helpful.

I do the majority of the reporting for our entire company. This means I have lots of daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual reports, but also a lot of ad hoc reports. I can definitely tell you that I'm overwhelmed trying to figure out how to see my incoming ad hocs with all of the visual noise of my recurring tasks. Mostly I'm echoing what's already been said, but I did want to include one suggestion:

It would be nice if I could create a dashboard widget to separate my recurring/non-recurring tasks. Task Type is already an option, but unfortunately the recurring feature isn't a selection there. I'd love to see that available.

I like wrike, their people seem to be great!  They are making a good effort being engaged with the community and I really appreciate that.  I'm sure their system will continue to grow thanks to this interaction.  

Yet I needed a solution today, therefore I ended up going with another service that handles this very well and fits into our workflow.  I literally spend over 60 hours testing different solutions, I must have tried more than 20 of them.  I narrowed it down to 3 solutions, wrike and 2 others.  

I don't want to post links to another service out of respect for Wrike, but if you want to talk about the research I have done, then feel free to email me at kai@luckybike.com

Best Regards,

Kai

Hi Kai, thanks for commenting here. I appreciate the feedback you shared about this, we're always open to hearing your thoughts and concerns about the functionality, since it helps us prioritize requests and learn about what's important to the Community. Conversations like this one are really insightful, and help spark internal discussions with our Product Team about potential improvements. While we can't deliver on all requests right away, we do take note of what's important to you. I'm sorry to hear that Wrike didn't work out as a tool for your use case, but I'm happy you found one that did. We'll always be happy to see you giving Wrike another try in the future, and will gladly discuss your workflow and use case, just let me know if there's anything I can help with!

I have Projects with multiple tasks that are assigned to selected staff members on specific days of each week. I would like to have the completed task re-populate for the next same-task service date, which would mean there is a way to set dates (or days of the week) for the task to appear again for the same assignee.

Currently I am using 'duplicate' because it allows me to chose the perimeters that apply to the task such as assignee, duplicate the description, set a due date, etc. Reoccurrence feature doesn't allow for any of that and it creates a monster task list that obliterates all other tasks and it also doesn't allow for more than 1 day per week for re-occurrence. The reoccurrence shows in the work list as a range of dates for the week even though I specified a date for one day. 

Using duplicate is great except for needing to keep track of each member's scheduled tasks and then do the duplications for future dates. Reading other comments here it seems we are all needing similar tools for the day-today task assignments for multiple staffing.  

Will you let us know if and when there might be an upgrade or creation to this feature?  ~ Thanks Much!

Hi Pamela, thanks so much for this comment! I love how detailed your explanation is, this is really helpful. While I don't have any timeframes to share right now, I'll definitely make sure to post updates to this thread.

This would be highly valuable to me. I am currently transitioning my team from asana to wrike and this is a pain point. The way asana handles it is that as soon as you complete a recurring task then it creates a new task with a due date x amount of time in the future. This works relatively well, although true recurring tasks (where it would show up in a calendar view each time it's due and only show up once in the task list) would be ideal.

For now our workaround will likely be to just manually recreate tasks for the future when the last one is complete. This is a minor annoyance but is better than creating multiple copies of the same task 60 times out into the future.

Please let me know if you make any changes to this functionality.

Patrick, thank you for the detailed comment! We'll definitely keep everyone here updated, and I just wanted to mention once more how useful and insightful all of the comments here are. Thank you everyone for taking the time to share your suggestions and ideas, this is really helpful!

Really appreciate the work on Wrike, Am currently considering moving my team from Redbooth to Wrike. Recurring tasks are one of the stumbling blocks for me as well. I hope that the developers will consider Jason's and others' suggestions. 

I completely agree with the comments in this forum. We have project managers that will be setting up recurring tasks and utilizing this feature, but when they look at the overall project list, these recurring tasks are cumbersome and appears like they have a lot more on their table. For an overall birds eye view, it would be nice to update this so that only the main task will show instead of all the recurring tasks. 

Do you know when this may be updated to only show the main task on the project list instead of all recurring tasks?

Hi John and Alisha, thanks for adding your votes to this! @Alisha, that's really helpful, and while I don't have any timeframes to share, our Product Team monitors the discussions here to learn about different use cases and requirements. Thank you for taking the time to share yours!

Hi there,

Is there a way to hide or not show every instance of a recurring task.

E.g. I have simple one like "Submit Today's Stand-Up" but I don't want that to visually drown out all my future tasks as @Jason originally mentioned. 

Would appreciate your advice here. Maybe there's a filter I'm missing so a recurring task doesn't break the ability to visually see important future tasks?

Hi Nikhil! One way to address this is to switch your reoccurring tasks to a "Deferred" status, that way you don't see them by default in your Workspace. If you do want to do this, I would use mass editing to quickly change the statuses for multiple tasks at one time. Then I would create a Custom Widget, so that you can easily go in and find your reoccuring tasks, without having to adjust filters all the time. To do this:

1. Select the Folder/Project with the reoccurring tasks.
2. Click "All active" and select the "Deferred" status - that way you'll see all tasks in the deferred status.
3. If your tasks have due dates, sort your view by Date. 
4. Click the menu icon in the List View's upper right-hand corner.
5. Hover over "Add to Dashboard" and select a Dashboard.

Now you'll have a widget on your Dashboard with all of your deferred tasks from the Folder/Project you selected. That way you can go into your Dashboard every day, open a task, switch it to active, and start working. Do you think that workflow could work?

Hello Stephanie: Thank you for monitoring this discussion, and for this suggestion. It's an ok workaround and at least solves the problem of having Repeating Tasks overwhelm the rest of our tasks. But it still requires multiple steps after the first task is created to schedule and access next instances of the task. Right now I am just duplicating the task once it's complete and setting a new due date. Also not an elegant solution. 

Redbooth and other services have a more elegant solution of automatically recreating the next scheduled task once the current instance of a repeating task is marked complete. I hope the developers will consider this option, along with Jason's other suggestions above.  

Perhaps this is something simple enough to be implemented as a step in the right direction to help with clutter:

• Allow each recurring task to have the checkbox option "Suppress future recurrences until their due date."

This way, I could keep daily or weekly tasks from appearing too soon, but still see other recurring tasks in advance as necessary. This doesn't address all of the problems, but it seems like it would help.

• A more robust implementation of this option would include an option like "Suppress future recurrences of this task until [_#_] [days/weeks/months] before their due date."

These tasks could still appear in Timeline view, but not in Dashboards or My Work.

Hi Everyone, I've been using Wrike as an enterprise user for a few years now. We are huge Wrike advocates and have expanded the use of Wrike throughout the whole organisation, we can no longer do without it. It's so much more than first meets the eye.

However, recurring tasks has been an issue for us since the start. I've always hoped that something would have been done by now. The reason I am back here is because it is just getting increasingly difficult for us to expand the system without constant feedback over the inadequacy of the recurring tasks function. 

It is great that Anastasia and Stephanie are monitoring this thread, but actually how useful is this process, if, after 2-3 years of waiting for some improvement nothing has happened?, It is disappointing to continue to see the same comments.

Please, could Wrike answer the questions below: 

1. Is the improvement on recurring task something that is actually on the development roadmap or not?

2. If it is on the roadmap, then what is the likely timescale for implementation?

3. If it isn't on the roadmap, what were the key reasons for its omission; it is worth us holding out any hope, or perpetuating this thread with even more comments?

I think everyone here has given awesome feedback that would make this feature great. For my company's needs, the current functionality of recurring tasks keeps us from using them - mainly because we don't want to flood our feeds with 50+ identical tasks that aren't connected (comments, details, etc.). I don't have any new ideas or suggestions to add to what's been listed above, but I had to comment to help bump this thread to keep it in your developers' view. 

Just adding more "what they said" to this conversation. Coming from Asana, this is indeed a huge negative on the side of Wrike.

In my case, I have a project of ~100 reports/invoices that I work through each month. Most are on the first of each month. In Asana, they're all recurring tasks, so it's a single list that automatically regenerates all of the tasks as I complete them. With Wrike, I'd have to set each to max out on recurrances (which is 60, I think), leaving 6000 tasks in that project. What chaos!

My best thought is to essentially create a template project that I copy and use each month, with a single recurring task on the first of each month to "go grab all of the tasks for today". That could work, but it's an ugly workaround. Coming from another system, I hate that one of the first things I'd be doing is working around their shortcomings.

Like Bernard just asked, are improvements to this on the roadmap at all, or just "great idea, maybe we'll fix it someday"?

Hi everyone, thank you for continuing to share your thoughts and suggestions here! This has been a hot discussion recently, and I wanted to share a reply I just posted in a similar thread:

Hi everyone, thank you once more for keeping the conversation going here. I wanted to post a note here to share the status of this request - I specifically brought up the most recent comments and conversations here with our Product Team last week, and we're actively discussing it now. I don't have an update or result to share just yet, but we will definitely post an update here soon about how these discussions are going. Thank you everyone for keeping this topic active and contributing your ideas!

Hi @all!

Background: we want to plan our capacities (technically in Wrike) on a weekly basis

Pain: Values from Custom Fields are not copied within Recurrent-Task-Feature.

Proposal: The user has the option to select recurrent-criteria analog to Duplicate-Task-Feature but adjustable.

"

-> Copy description: copy the task description when the task is duplicated
-> Copy attachments: include the same attachments on the duplicated task
-> Copy assignees: keep the same assignees when the task is duplicated
-> Copy Custom Fields (for Business and Enterprise users): duplicated tasks always have the same Custom Fields as the original task, but this toggle signals that data entered in the original task should be copied to the new task
-> Reschedule: set a start or due date for the task

"

ETA: ?

Our team (as many others I would imagine) would highly benefit from hiding all of next recurring tasks except the "active" recurring task

Super-easy UX solution:

• Add checkbox to add recurring window with 1 functionality only to recurring task: "Show recurring tasks on start date"

This would be incredibly helpful, much like other comments on here my business also has many daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual tasks. Having a clutter to-do list while recurring tasks creates a new task over and over is far too overwhelming to look at and hides our other tasks. As of now we have been using Wrike but cannot fully integrate it into our organization because of factors like this - still every morning we write out na hard copy of each of our daily tasks - however, this is what Wrike is for. 

Google calendars does a great job allowing customization of schedules. When creating a task on GC you have the option to repeat the task every Mon/Tues/Weds/Etc, as well as setting specific dates it occurs on. Perhaps you should let these kinds of features on other sites guide you as you create features that help you retain your users and invite new ones. 

Thanks!

I too was very disappointed when I first created a recurring task in Wrike. To see every instance was very visually overwhelming. On our old system, the task would auto-duplicate to the next recurrence only after it was completed. This too was not ideal, as one could not fully visualize on a timeline or calendar their workload for the future. I think a simple toggle switch "show/hide recurring tasks" would suffice for the visual noise, but I do love the original poster's suggestions as well.