Recurring Tasks in Notion!
Notion gets closer to being a No Brainer.
Notion has continued to innovate over the past few years, which has been awesome to see as a power user of the software.
One big level up recently has been their addition of recurring templates, most notably used to create recurring tasks on your calendar.
This has had big consequences already for my Notion environment and how I use it. Most notably, it has made my Task Tracker even more of a central hub.
Let’s take a look at what that looks like with a few examples of my recurring tasks:
Ex 1: Journaling
I’ve created a recurring task to journal every week that shows up on Monday morning:
That’s easy enough. But the magic of Notion is that I can embed a view of the journal database within the template. That way, when I click on the “Journal Entry” task, the following pops up:
So there I can pretty easily just click “New” and add a new journal entry, which basically fills it in “in flow” from my Task Tracker, rather than having me jump to a journal app (whether within Notion or elsewhere).
Many other examples follow this, where basically I want to enter or interact with a data set that I have in Notion on a recurring basis. Previously, jumping between each app or each database added some resistance. You’d have to create a task, jump to the other place, and then return to the task tracker to check off the task. Now, this can all be handled in one place with one flow.
Monthly Stuff
There are a few things that I try to do each month. Typically, this cadence has been tough to manage. It’s not quite a habit, and can easily slip your mind and miss a few months at a time.
One example: each month I try to plan at least one “Experiment” where I try some new thing or new routine for a week. Here too, the task template has a view of my “Experiment DB” which holds an entry for each potential experiment I’ve been thinking about - thinks like an Intermittent Fasting Week or a No Games week, et cetera.
Tactically, I use this database to rank prioritize what I’ll try to do next and then schedule it as necessary.
So in my “app” architecture where I build an “app” within Notion for each main use case I have, two of those smaller apps: the Journal and the Experiment Planner have now basically moved inside of the Task Tracker. This is great as it simplifies the workflow and reduces the amount of jumping around that needs done.
Birthdays
Lastly, I’ve added birthdays for my extended family as recurring tasks. This is great as it again puts everything in one place, rather than having to jump over to my CRM to see what birthdays are coming up.
I’ve set these up as annual tasks, and notably have them show up a week prior to the birthday so that I can make plans as necessary!
It’s worth calling out how that is done exactly. Due to the nuances of how tasks are setup, I’ve had to setup a two-date system for setting a Due Date for a task. This gets a tad complicated:
High level: a tasks due date by default is set to the date that the task is created. That can be overridden in two ways: 1) adding a delay (the “LFC” field here that I honestly forget what LFC stands for), or 2) specifying an exact “Assign Date”.
The Due Date reflects this. So a birthday task is created a week prior with an LFC of 7 to get it to the exact date. Meanwhile many of the tasks I add manually I just set an assign date as needed.
One big caveat right now: it sets the first recurrence not to be the first date entered, but rather the next occurrence. So a monthly task set to recur on the first of each month from Jan 1st would appear for the first time on Feb 1st, not Jan 1st. And this is worse for annual: a birthday task setup for an April 7, 2023 birthday/recurrence wouldn’t start until April 7, 2024. So the workaround is to just create the first annual event manually. Hopefully Notion addresses this with future updates!
So that should give you an idea! Some other ideas for recurring tasks:
Reminders to call family/friends on a monthly/quarterly basis
Checking in on finances, doing expense reports, etc.
Mowing the Lawn, changing AC/Water Filters, or doing any other number of house-related things relatively infrequently
And I’m sure there are more! Obviously there are cases in the work world too, or if you are using Notion for your small business, but we’ll have to cover those at another time!
A quick preview: next week we’ll also be covering how I am now using recurring tasks to bring Habit Tracking into my task tracker. This has been a sort of holy grail for me as a desire to find an effective merger between task tracking and habit tracking, so please stay tuned for that!