Would be great if i could set a todo that appeared at a certain time. Even better if i could set it to be recurring. So for example i have to top up my bus pass and send the receipt to HR every month.
In an ideal world, what i would like the todo to do is appear in my work list on the 20th of every month, stay there until i tick it off, then appear again the next month. i dont want it sitting taking up a space on my list all month when its too early for me to be able to do it.
In other cases, i would want certain tasks i only do say on a thursday to appear on my lists just on that day, but be recurring, and other tasks that i do at a certain time on say a Monday to pop up with a beep at that time.
I think we will get to this though in my mind, we want to tackle non scheduled recurring items first. Then this will make sense to layer on top. (I just feel like it will require some fairly complicated UI with it to accommodate all kinds of repeated scheduling cases so that may take more time to digest on.)
This looks like quite a rabbit hole to me. Inevitably someone is going to want a recurring item on the last day of the month, or second Wednesday of the month, or last weekday of the month, and so forth. Getting all that right, and with a reasonable UI, is not a task for the faint of heart! And if you don’t include all those cases, the feature will feel incomplete, which is worse than a missing feature in some ways.
Honestly, I am satisfied with just using the builtin Reminders app for recurring events. They are not so many, and almost by definition, they are rarely altered.
Of course, you can already have a poor man’s recurring event in Clear: Instead of marking a scheduled event as done, just pull further right and reschedule by hand.
Agreed it’s a rabbit hole. We use that term (and ‘can of worms’) quite a bit internally, and we’re extremely paranoid of getting deep into them too early.
But yeah I am excited about tackling at least non-scheduled recurring items sooner than later in our roadmap. (Rituals, habits, whatever we might call them.) I think properly incorporating those into the Clear loop would feel like a big core hole filled in after over 10 years.
Ah, this got me thinking. Non-scheduled recurring items?
I have an app, got it about ten years ago, called Recur! I have used it regularly for all these years. It hasn’t been updated in the past five years; perhaps it is not even sold anymore. Basically, it’s a list of recurring tasks. When you have done a task, you swipe it right, and it will pop to the top of the list. It will also be marked with the time and date of (most recent) completion. If Clear could do the same, I would happily delete that app! (The app also keeps a complete list of the dates each task has been done, but I really don’t see much use for that in my own life.)
The important point for me, at least, for each recurring task I want to know how long it’s been since I last completed it. This is useful for tasks that don’t have to be done on a rigorous schedule, but still have to be done at sort of regular intervals.
Here is how I imagine it could work in Clear: You create a task, then mark it as recurring without specifying a date or time. Now, when you swipe right on the task, instead of being marked done, it will display a completion date, but remain active. I suggest putting the completion date in the upper left, opposite where any due date is usually shown.
To complement this idea, I think it would be nice to have smart lists: One could be for recurring task as just described, showing the tasks in order of last completion. Another could be for scheduled tasks, again showing them in order of due date. Swiping left on a task in a smart list could take you to the task’s actual home list, where you can delete it if you wish – or just see it in its natural context.
There’s some possibility we could support showing that information (or how many times you have completed it) as tags and layer it on. I would say the base functionality I’m imagining so far is along these lines:
Mark an item as recurring. When you check it off, then clear it away, it would regenerate in your list.
I think this would feel satisfying and seems simple in the right way.