Setting aside this topic for feedback from recent blog post:
http://blog.gtdnext.com/feature-focus-repeating-tasks/
Excellent description, as usual. Very clear and easy to understand.
As far as the functionality as such is concerned I would like to take the opportunity to repeat a few of my strong opinions:
- re. auto-cancel: if you are going to be showing a since date, auto-inhibit is more useful than auto-cancel, i.e showing the date of the first missed occurrence. Seeing the start date of the last occurrence will not indicate that anything is wrong. Also, auto-inhibit will let you keep any special notes you may have made for the first (missed) instance.
- re. the “folder”: regular subtasks are extremely useful. How will you implement that in a practical way if you use the task’s parenting capabilities for keeping all the repeated instances of the task? Is there any way that you could let people add normal subtasks, too? And perhaps “hide” the repeat instances in a subfolder (as a compulsory subtask with subsubtasks for the instances)?Or something? This would allow people to add additional normal subtasks. The repeat folder is nothing I imagine people will need to look into very often at all (probably mainly when trouble-shooting or out of technical curiosity, but not as a part of a person’s productivity needs).
- re. the creation of the task: will you please consider creating the next spawned task in Scheduled immediately upon spawning of the current instance? Very handy for “scribbling” additional notes etc to the next scheduled instance. And to be sure that there is always a “scheduled next instance” of everything - such that you know that the Scheduled list is truly complete and that you can check the next date for everything.