Recurrent Tasks vs. Recurrent Reminder

I've got to echo Jörn. We've got a weekly task that is recurring 365 days a year. Currently we just move the due dates out a week each time it's completed. 

I've tried literally dozens of PM systems over the years, and this is a feature MOST struggle with. I think it has to do with the fact that most PM systems are focused on project work that generally has a clear start and finish, or a directional roadmap.

A lot of what we do is recurring work for ongoing clients with occasional new projects for them that don't require any of the more robust task mapping features that Wrike provides. Therefore we're trying to adapt a system to a workflow that it's not ideally designed for (but incredibly flexible and serves us very well).

In the end I think the larger problem is accountability. Being able to ensure that things are getting checked off, instead of one recurring task getting bumped out each week. It also makes it harder for me to show my clients that we are indeed completing it in any sort of way. We've been toying with the idea of displaying a 'completed' task list via API in our software for multiple reasons. Maybe it's more psychology than efficiency at the end of the day, but I'd also like a smarter solution than the multiple tasks created at once.

Widgets might work, and I'm thinking we spend too much time in the general folder structure anyway. 

Always a good topic for discussion :)

Hi Kimberly! Thank you for your input, I've added a vote from you to this request :)

In case you have sets of recurring daily or weekly tasks, another suggestion I had was to create a Folder Template and then duplicate it weekly. This allows you to divide tasks into Folders or Projects grouped by date, making the List View tidier. To make the list even shorter, instead of creating five daily tasks for the week, you can create one task with a five day duration. To address the problem with accountability, you can run Reports based on these weekly Folders. Happy to hear your thoughts on this!

I also wanted to let you know that we just launched a Wrike API Community section, where we hope to build up a gold mine of best practices and use cases. It would be great to hear some tips from you there. If you have any questions about the API, this is the perfect place to ask them :)

I'd also like to add a vote to this request. I want my view not to be crowded by my recurring projects.

Shelley, thank you for the comment! I've added a +1 from you, and will continue adding votes for anyone else who comments on this thread.

Hello, 

In my case I try to have everything so that it shows on my dashboards and the information is very clean and I rarely enter my general tasks folder. So even though in your main folders you have a ton of tasks in your widgets it only shows what you have for the week or next month. Even so, for transparency purposes when people enter my folders the recurring tasks do take up all the space so I think for personal organization it's great but you would have to rarely go to your folders, and then if another person wants to check your folder all they would see is that.

This was also discussed multiple times in the wrike vote forum. Many just wanted the recurring function of microsoft Outlook. When completing a recurring task it just creates a new one that fits into the schedule plan. So if you let your scheduled task get overdue and finally complete it, it skips the ones you missed and creates a new one ahead.

Maybe if you create a hybrid like a single recurring task that exists only once but is still scheduled multiple times in the Calendar view and all date realted views, maybe the upcomming tasks could be shown as subtasks. Just an idea.. i guess it would be to complicated to understand the logic at first but i do not think there is a easy solution for this problem.

I'd be up for +1 -ing this as well.  We don't have it occur a lot, but this does sound like it would make everything a bit cleaner overall when we look at our tasks.

This is something I can get behind. We have monthly reports that we have to pull and I ended up dedicating a folder for just them to get around it on my dashboard. 

The only tools I recall having an elegant solution to this was Asana and DO (now gone).

You could schedule the recurring task and it would create one single task.

When the due date passed it would create another task, on and on. You could easily see if the previous week's tasks were marked done or not.

However, it would only let you set recurring for up to one year. That's not a deal-breaker though, a very reasonable limitation. 

I am not sure, this is one of these decisions where what has to win is pragmatism. If the recurrent tasks populates your view and is always assigned to the same person with the same description, then maybe just create one task where a comment is added every time the task is done. Not sure. Maybe recurrent tasks could be numbered subtasks-

I´m not sure about how to solve this, because as a manager of some HR I have a recurrent task and every week change the people who will make this recurrent tasks, so I have to create task in Wrike and scheduled one by one, but I also make a reminder for all the team with endless stream, they have to send and email, at the end of the task but if the task end on certainly hour and i don´t have the email, well I have to push the member of the team on charge to complete this task. The reminder appears 20 mins and 1 min before the due time, so I´m in the lookout for the task

I use my dashboard to more clearly see what is on my plate for today versus next week, versus next month. For me, I the recurring task that is for today would appear in today's to-do list while other future ones are listed in "later this week" so it doesn't clutter my daily list of tasks. 

Hi everyone, thank you for these details! I've shared all of these great thoughts with our Product Team and they are thinking about recurring tasks. Learning about different use cases helps our developers better understand feature requests and look into possible solutions, so thank you once more for taking the time to share your ideas about this!

Thanks Joern. That is a question I have also asked before. Like Nihad I would love the outlook calendar function. Or the repeat task function you find on MS Project.

Anastasia, we need this urgently. Widgets don't work for this and copying tasks or making them week long also does not give the full satisfaction you need. Still too many steps.

Hoping there will be a solution soon.

And this is why I still use pen and paper for my "to do" list. Wrike is good for planning out big projects and keeping track of things as a group, but you're right, it's annoying to see a task that you do every month on your daily to do list. I'm interested in seeing how the team solves this issue.

@Nicole, thank you for your input! I've added +1s from both you and @Stephanie. One thing I wanted to mention, is that I'm personally a huge fan of Folder duplication. If there's a set of weekly or monthly tasks which repeat several times, I create a template Folder with all of the required steps, and then I duplicate it as many times as needed. This is especially helpful when I want to organize my completed tasks, because I already have weekly/monthly Subfolders which I can just move into my archive Folder. It's easy to keep track of the active tasks too, because I only work out of the Folder for the current time frame. 

I ask my teammates to input their recurrent tasks in order to have a picture of my team's workload at any given time. That way I know who is the most optimal person to assign a new task to.

Hi Edgar! Thank you for sharing that tip, adding all tasks into Wrike definitely makes it easy to track your team's Workload at any time :)

Thanks for sharing this experience, Jörn Weber! Please, tell me, is this topic existed on vote.wrike.com? can we vote for it there?

Hi Andrey,

I did not submit it to vote.wrike.com.

Plus one vote from me.  This is a great idea!  Keep them coming..

@Andrey and @David, I've added your votes to our internal feedback about this, which we send straight to the Product Team. I'll continue adding votes for anyone else who comments on this thread :) Thank you to everyone for sharing your thoughts and ideas about this functionality!

plus one from me! Our team uses recurrent tasks for social media tasks. Due to the density of recurring SM tasks like daily tweets, fb posts etc. for various campaigns our list views get overloaded.

Our preferred solution is having an option in the Edit Recurring Task window to Hide ALL but the first recurring task. 

Note: it's helpful having all recurring tasks visible to give managers a better picture of Today, Tomorrow, Next Week workload. We just want the option to hide this for certain tasks.

Thanks for your efforts!

G

Gabriel, I've added the information about your use case to this feedback request. Thank you for this detailed description!

Hi Anastasia ... Please +1 from me as well.  I will make use of the Duplication folder with templates.  However, we have daily or weekly client check-in calls that last for 15-30 mins.  These can add up to significant time requirements that if not tracked give a false read of capacity utilization and resource availability.  Thanks!

@Chad, thank you for your input! I've added your vote to this request internally.

I also want to let everyone know that we just launched a section dedicated to Product Feedback on the Community. Here you can share your feedback and ideas, discuss them with Wrike Team members and other users, as well as upvote existing requests. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts there! :)

I would also like a solution for not diaplaying recurring tasks until the individual item become due in the upcoming timeframe displayed. I think hiding all but the current recurring instance would be a good option.

We need to be able to make tasks recurrent monthly without confusing the list view..... so +1 from our team. 

+1 for me also. I would just like to the next upcoming recurrent task in the list.