- So for the longest time, I have wanted to do my task
management inside Notion where I run the rest of my business, but I have been plagued
by a pernicious issue, that until today, I
couldn't seem to figure out, and that is the issue of recurring tasks. How do you do them, how do you say, I wanna do a task today, and I want it to come right back around into my task manager next week? Well, over the past week or so, I've been figuring out
a method for doing that, and in this video I'm gonna
teach you how to do it and also share a template so you can use it in your
own Notion workspace. So let's just jump right into it. Here we have a recurring tasks template, you will find a link in the description for copying this and
playing around with it. In this video, I'm going
to explain it to you, show you how it works under the hood. The main limitation that
we are gonna run into here is that we cannot change the
state of say, a due column, a date column, based on what happens to
something like a check box column. So unfortunately what we can't do here is check Done, and then
have it come around later. So what we have here is a task table that has both recurring
and one-time tasks. So when I've got things
listed as one time, what I can do to check those
off is simply check them off. But with recurring ones, checking them off isn't
really gonna do anything except for change the sort order, because I need to do
them again at some point. So instead what we have is, first, a due column that tells
us when the due date is. And then we also have a next due column, so this is showing us when the
next time we should do it is, based on a recur interval. So this is just the number of days that you want to wait until
the task is due again. And all you do to check it off, is look at that next due date, right here. And then move over to due and
set it to that next due date. And bam, your next due date will automatically update
itself, based on your interval. And there's some logic
in here to make sure that even if you are overdue
by a certain amount of days, it is going to move forward the number of days that you would want. There is a very, very,
very complex formula that took me the better
part of a day to code to make sure this actually works. If you're really curious about it, there is the formula, in both a condensed version
and an extended version, in the template, so you
can take a look at it. But essentially this solves the problem that I had in my head, which was, if we're
overdue by, say five days, on a monthly task, well, if that task was set for the first of the
month, every single month, and we check it off on
the fifth of the month, without this logic, it would get set to the
fifth of next month. But we want it to stay on
the first of the month. So this logic essentially says "Hey, as long as we're not
really, really, really overdue, "we're just gonna go
forward by the interval." There's a lotta code in
there that checks that out. So that's essentially how you do this. And with an unfiltered view, you're just gonna get a
series of moving dates here, which isn't really what we want, but you can combine this
with the filtering mechanisms to get a really useful view. So here is our main view that shows all tasks no matter what. And if we look at the
filter criteria here, all we're showing is tasks
that are assigned to me, which in this case is every task, and we are sorting by, first, the done criteria being checked off, and then their due date
in ascending order. Let's go ahead and check this one back to its unchecked state, so we can go over to this other
view that I've created here. So this one is a little bit more useful. Instead of showing everything, if you go to the filtering here, first, we got the same sort criteria, except we're not even going to show ones that are checked
off for one-time tasks. And then we have a nice
little set of filters that shows anything assigned to me, where the due date is on
or before a week from now, so this is essentially anything that is due a week from now, and including anything due
today and overdue tasks. And then we have a nice little
nested group of filters here that show us all of our recurring tasks, but they also show us
all of our one-time tasks that have not yet been checked off. So, the upshot of this is
when you have a one-time task you can check that right off, and it's going to simply go away. And then with our recurring tasks, if I update the due date to a date that is outside
of our filter criteria, then it's not going to show either. So with this task, we were
actually overdue by a week here. So let me go ahead and update it to today. And now the next due date is
going to be one week from now. Well we know we're a week out, so I would see that, let's go ahead and update this to 14 days just to show you what would happen, if I go ahead and update
this to October 26th. Let's go ahead and do
that, and it is gone. So, with the combination of checking Done on your one-time tasks, and then moving your due date based on this next due column
with your recurring tasks, you can get a task management list that works really well for basically anything
that you have to do. To make it just a little bit easier to see at a glance what's overdue, what's due today, and what's planned, let's go back over to
this All Tasks View here. We've got these little colors
in this column called state. So this is another formula,
and I can open up this toggle so you can see it a
little bit more clearly. This basically shows a red
circle if it's overdue, a green circle if it is due today, a blue circle if it is planned, or a white circle of it
has no due date whatsoever. So, I just built this into the system so that I could see every day at a glance, hey, what's overdue in my system, what's due today, and what's
comin' up in the near future? And if you wanted to, you could make these
blue circles split out into maybe purple ones for
coming up in the next week, blue for far out in the future, whatever is that you want to do. (electronic crackle)
So, like I said, the template link for
this is in the description if you just want to
duplicate and play with it, but on this channel I really want to help you
understand these systems, I think this is crucial because when you have actual
practice with the systems you're going to start to be
able to combine Notion's tools, in new and innovative ways, I actually view Notion as
almost a programming language with more graphical elements than most programming languages, there's a lotta code in there too, and if you can understand how to use these functions
in different ways, you're gonna be able to solve
lots of different problems. So, let's go ahead and build this, essentially from scratch here. If we have a brand new table here, first we're gonna name our main row Tasks. So we're gonna have our task names there. We're going to create a select criteria, with the properties
One-Time and Recurring. Then we're going to do a due date. We're gonna have an assignee column. Person. We're gonna have a recur interval, that's gonna just be a simple number. And then we have our two formula columns, the first one being Next Due
Date, and then we have State. Okay, so these are all of the columns that we're going to need for
this task management system, I'm now just going to put them in the order in which I want them. I just realized I forgot,
the most important one, which is our Done check box, we're not usin' that for
any crazy formulas, but hey what good is a task manager
without a fancy checkbox? So we're gonna move that, move this, and let's just create a
recurring task example, and a one-off task example. Set our tags correctly for each of these, we're gonna set a due date. So let's just go ahead and
set it today for both of them. Set it to me 'cause I get all the tasks, at least in this example. And then for a recurring one, let's set a recur interval
of, say, seven days. So, from here, I'm not going
to type out the exact formula because that would be a little bit crazy for a YouTube video, if
you want to check it out, if you wanna study in the template, feel free, go ahead, you know, go nuts, learn how to use the formulas, I think that's a really
powerful part of Notion. But for now we are just
gonna copy and paste, the ultimate secret weapon of basically every
programmer in the world. So for our next Due, we'll go
ahead and edit the formula. Paste that in, back to formula, as Dr. Osborne's underlings would say. And then we're gonna grab
the compressed version of our state formula as well. Head on over into here, paste
that in, bada bing, bada boom! We have ourselves a recurring task manager that can also elegantly
handle one-time tasks. The only thing you wanna do from here, is create your filters. So we can do that real quick. I'll do assignee equals me. We had Due is on, or
before, one week from now, so we're getting a week out, we're also seeing anything
potentially overdue. Then we're gonna create a filter group, where the type is either recurring, or, another filter group here, the type is one time, and the
Done property is not checked. And there we go, there's our filter group. So we've got one week out, so if I go ahead and move
this to now, it's there, if I go ahead and move it
to the 26th, it's gone. If I go ahead and check
this off, it's gone. So that is how you get recurring tasks, in a task manager within Notion. Again, I'm gonna to have
the template link for this, in the description down
below, so check that out. And if you enjoyed this tutorial and you wanna see more just like it, hit that Subscribe button,
hit that Like button, help me launch this brand new channel, and, if you want a written
version of this tutorial, you can go over thomasjfrank.com/notion, or find the other link
in the description below, I'll have a written up version and I'm also going to be
linking to all of my templates, I've got a note taking system,
a video management system. I've got a course that I'm working on, so you can sign up to
get updates about that, and last but not least, there are several other
great Notion creators here on YouTube and all over the internet, and a lot of them have their
own takes on recurring tasks, so I'm gonna link to a few of them in the article version of this video, check them out, go follow them as well, I know Danny Hatcher has
one, Marie Poulin has one. So check everyone out that's
got their own recurring tasks, and I will see you in the next tutorial. (upbeat bass music)
