Auto renewing (and auto-expiring) to-dos

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1

This may relate to your work on integration of reminders/calendar, though it is somewhat nuanced.

Besides the normal to-dos which are either ongoing or are tied to a specific date, I also have the following categories of to-dos for which a special UI would be helpful.

  1. To-dos which recur, typically daily, which are important enough to remind myself but are not critical (e.g., shaving when not on a fixed work schedule) and for which I do not want any of these:
    1. Timed reminders, forcing me to dismiss or snooze
    2. Polluting my to-do listing (or calendar) when I have marked them complete nor do I want them accumulating over time when recurring.

I want an opportunity to dismiss them, yet ensure they show up the next day (or at whatever frequency)–though only showing up on a list of my choosing with other to-dos like my agenda–not an alarm and not a visible calendar item. I don’t even want them on a Today listing, as I’d like to see the items with my “On the Agenda”, as I don’t tend to fix my to-dos to a date.

  1. To-dos which I may be inspired to add to a list as a possible item to do for that day (typically an idea to do something recreational, e.g., with the family), but which I do not:
    1. Want to be automatically added every day.
    2. Want to have to go to the trouble of marking the item as complete if the day goes by (they are not achievements, so crossing them off almost makes them feel like a chore), and I don’t want them nagging me after the moment has gone by.

It would be nice if some one-off to-dos like this could be easily set with a fixed recurring expiry time for all such to-dos (e.g., 1am for the end of the day) and disappear from view after that time (though perhaps with a special “hidden” tag, at least that was retained for a day that could be rediscovered).

2

First, it’s important to separate what you mean with To-Do, do you mean the reminder as it appears in the Reminders app and in the inspector inside Agenda on the right? Or do you mean a note that has a reminder or checklist inside that is linked to a certain date or calendar event.

A recurring reminder works pretty much as you say, in that it stays there until you check it off, at which point a new one is automatically rescheduled. At the moment you’d have to create these in the Reminders app, we hope to make simple recurring reminders also possible to create from within Agenda in the future.

When it comes to recurring notes, I don’t think this is something we plan to add as it can easily lead to empty notes being accumulated over time. We prefer that the creation of a note is always an explicit action, while events and reminders can set to be recurring in their respective apps and show as such in Agenda (as these are not of permanent nature and hence don’t accumulate over time).

It would be nice if some one-off to-dos like this could be easily set with a fixed recurring expiry time for all such to-dos

The automatically expiring todo’s is not something we’ll add either. Instead we are thinking more about providing good overviews of unchecked checklist items etc so that it becomes easy to check them off in one go.