[Status: Not planned] Improve how Recurring tasks work
Greetings!
I must confess that of all the many, awesome features in Wrike, recurring tasks is probably the one I'm most underwhelmed by. One of the tools that we came from was Asana, which falls short in so many ways, but handles recurring tasks very well.
I was bummed the first time I created a recurring task and found that Wrike simply created a task for every single instance. There's one task that we do every month, for example, for the foreseeable future. First, I realized I couldn't simply have it recur indefinitely. Then, after setting it to 5 years, I realized I'd created this monster list which ate all the other tasks, visually.
I understand this would likely require back-end changes, but please consider changing how recurring tasks work. Here's a couple thoughts:
- Make it a single task marked as a recurring task (bringing things like description and comments to a single place)
- Allow for a task to recur indefinitely. Since it's just a single task, no problem!
- Instead of a task being daily or weekly or monthly or yearly, allow a user to define multiple recurrence rules, providing the flexibility for more bizarre schedules
Being a task attribute, I believe it would also lend itself to open support for recurring subtasks as well.
Hope this helps! :)
Hi folks, that's correct, as Elaine mentioned above, this suggestion will be reviewed again in the future, but for now, it remains not planned. I'm sorry you're disappointed. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help you with.
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
As with a similar post to this one, it continues to be ignored by Wrike dev team. This one for 5 years now; the other post for 2 1/2 years. So disappointing that Wrike continues to fail its users by not addressing the requests.
This post has 71 followers and has been upvoted 144 times and is 5 years old. What more does it take to get these requests addressed?
I guess it's way more important to add the Invite link to the Create button (green "+" button), which is unnecessary in my opinion, than it is to improve the features that have functional weaknesses.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts here Jason Pontius! I understand your sentiment here as this suggestion is indeed popular. Unfortunately, as you may know, our team can't commit to work on every idea posted on the Community. However, I've flagged this post with the Product team again, and although there are no concrete plans at the moment, there might be some updates for recurring tasks in the future.
We'll be sharing any news here on the Community 👍
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Jason Pontius - Please refer to my post last March. There was an effort in 2020/2021 to assess this. At the end of the day this is a Design issue. From my understanding there would have to be a major restructuring to fix this. One that we (Mark Tuggle, Ella Flansburg, Evan Rakowski) and many other have been asking for for years. If this functionality is vital, you will probably have to look to a different tool; because at this point, I don't think this will ever be addressed by Wrike. I do wish they would just tell us that it is not going to be added.
Scott Harris I revisited your posts last year. I believe I was one of the people that was surveyed/interviewed regarding this topic. I have had a number of calls with Wrike discussing feedback, improvements, frustration points, etc. but I have given up since it's a waste of my time. None of my feedback (which often reflects feedback from others as well) has been addressed that I can recall.
We really don't know if the "technical obstacles" on this issue are related to overall system architecture or more a priority on where they want to assign their resources. They never really tell us anything, as you pointed out, regarding the future. It's always "not on the road map" but never say if it ever will be addressed or when, or why something isn't possible. Best you can hope for is that someday they may decide to work on it.
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
That's a bummer that this isn't something the team is looking at improving. I'm in the same boat with all of the other great features Wrike has, the recurring feature is the most underwhelming. We have a lot of recurring tasks every week/month, but when I set it up I realized that it didn't duplicate over subtasks which is a huge disappointment.
Is there a reasoning behind that?? Those are part of the template, so why it not duplicate the entire thing over?
Hey Brittany Stringer, the reason for this is other planned updates that we'll be announcing on the Community in the coming months. I understand that this suggestion here is important to everyone in this thread. We continue passing on the feedback here, and if we have an update on recurring tasks in the future, we'll let you know.
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
I 100% upvote. Please implement ASAP!
My team is becoming extremely frustrated because their inbox is full of spam whenever I update their recurring 'upfront' tasks.
We are a rapidly growing hands-on animal experience establishment, and the animals move around weekly/monthly for their seasonal breaks. We need up to a year planned out for each animal (We have over 150 species), and every time something changes (almost weekly), I have to create new recurring tasks, spamming their inboxes.
This seems like it could be fixed by adding some kind of (backend) tag or label to 'upfront recurring' tasks to be silenced when toggled in settings...
Thank you,
Naomi
Hi Naomi Bush, thank you for sharing your use case and feedback here, I'm passing it on to the team🙋🏻♀️
Cansu Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Cansu Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Couldn't agree more, Naomi Bush. Most of us have implemented Wrike in order to get away from the inefficiencies of email, so we need more control over what hits/doesn't hit users' Inboxes. Simply put: users don't need an Inbox notification when a task is assigned unless the user is specifically tagged by the assigning user - it is just another annoying thing we have to wade thru. Also, at least in our case, we have some users that continue to use their Wrike Inbox as a de facto task list, just like their email inbox, which is one of the reasons we opted for Wrike. By giving us the ability to turn this off, we could force users to use their task lists/dashboards.
I am honestly shocked that the recurring subtask feature is not being implemented. I am on Wrike with over 100 people, but I can tell you that some don't want to use Wrike because of the barriers created by this feature. Social media marketing, for example, requires a high number of touchpoints resulting in a high number of repeat tasks and subtasks. To recreate the subtasks manually because they aren't carried over in the main task recurrence is inefficient, and efficiency is a large reason why anyone chooses to use project management software.
Currently I am also underwhelmed, like so many, about recurring tasks. Since there's no option to have subtasks recur with the main task (like in Asana, functions as a really great recurring checklist under the main task so it doesn't clog up the to do list/My Tasks view), I'm stuck with a really, REALLY tedious workaround by creating a checklist in the original task draft and then making it recur so that it repopulates with the checkboxes. However, since you can't use checklists in the Recurring Task edit window, I have to delete the existing recurrence and recreate it every time I need to adjust what happens on Daily/Weekly/Monthly/etc. bases - or I can create a bulleted list and manually convert it to checkboxes every time it recurs, but that's also a waste of time. I can't believe there hasn't been more movement here since 2017 since it's such a common use case.
I may need to move my own personal task management back to Asana, even though my company is paying for Wrike, because my workflow is just unusable on this platform for day-to-day so far and even as a systems and processes person (literally - I was hired to help (re)build them for my department), I can't find a way to make it work after a month of trying, daily.
Juan M. M. Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Juan M. M. Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
I came here to find the quick fix for getting subtasks to duplicate along with a recurreing task... and discouraged to see how long this needed feature has been requested and not delivered. SO I'm here to say that subtasks should recur along with the main task, and not having that is making more work for me.
Thank you for supporting this suggestion Kristin Irvin. We don't have any updates here at the moment, but please rest assured your feedback is sent to our team.
Let me know if we can help you with anything else.
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover