The Easiest Way to Create Recurring Tasks in Notion (2024)

notion can be a great app for task management and a lot of people use it for that purpose including myself one thing people often struggle with when they're trying to use notion for their tasks and to-dos is recurring tasks however if you know what you're doing you can set notion up to perfectly handle your recurring tasks and today I'm going to show you exactly how to do that at three different levels at level one I'm going to show you how you can use a built-in native notion feature for free to get pretty much most of the way there and depending on who you are it might be perfectly adequate for your needs uh at level two we're going to look at a system that my team and I built which adds true recurring task support to notion with lots of recur intervals last weekday of the month all kinds of good stuff like that and then at level three I'm going to show you how to automate that level two setup so it works just like it would in any other traditional task management app if you're coming from my older recurring tasks automation video that I made a couple of years ago you can skip directly to level three and I have time stamps in the description down below I have essentially made that automation about 10,000 times easier to set up and much more powerful I'm going to show you some of the new features that I've added to it later on in the video including the ability to easily even send a task report to slack after it processes your tasks but I also want to use this video as a way to educate people on how they can set up recurring tasks using native inapp features in notion and that's what we're going to do at level one so let's get started right here in this extremely simple simple tasks database I have very on the nose name here I'm going to assume that you already know a little bit about databases in notion if you don't I have a full beginners guide to databases but here we have a simple table style database with a name property a status property where we can set tasks who not started in progress and done and a due date property so here are three example tasks that would probably be recurring tasks in your life so how can we make these tasks recurring if we open up this due date property here we don't really have an option to repeat anything so this isn't going to help us however there is a feature inside a notion that can help us and it's their database template feature so if I come over here to this little blue new menu here and I click this Arrow I can see that I have these templates and you can see here there are two templates that I've already set up called send newsletter and clear email inbox and they have these little repeat symbols turned on so these are examples of what are called repeating templates inside of notion you can essentially create templates that are going to apply specific sets of properties and even page content inside of notion I use these all the time for things like YouTube video projects in my Creator companion template and there is a repeat function which can automatically create new pages with these templates on a schedule so let me go ahead and delete these and I'm going to show you how to build them from scratch and we'll create ourselves a brand new template right here so let's call this one clear inbox and we can give it an icon it's going to be automatically applied every time the page is created and then we can also set default property values now the status property type is already set to a default value it's configured in the actual status status property itself and we have not started as our default we also want a due date as well so if we open this up here we can see that we can set a specific due date or more usefully we can set one of two Dynamic dates we can go with now which is going to be the current date with the current time or we can go with today which is just the current date without the time now I don't really put times on my tasks in notion so I'm just going to go with today and now my template is set up now all I have to do is back out of the template and then go back to the templates menu click this little three dot menu right here and choose a repeat setting so if I open this up I get daily weekly monthly yearly or off if I go with daily I can do every day I can do every two days Etc I could also go with weekly and what I like about weekly is it gives me this little uh selection of days here so if I just have the second te for Thursday selected then I'm going to have a uh basically once per week task created but for clearing my email inbox I might actually want to have that done every weekday but not on my weekends so I'm going to go with repeat weekly I'm going to choose my weekdays and I'm going to hit save and boom I have myself a repeating template set up and that's how you can use Notions native repeating templates feature to more or less add recurring tasks to notion now what do I mean by more or less well there's one big drawback to this feature and it's the reason that I actually don't use it for recurring tasks and I use the system that I'm going to show you throughout levels 2 and three in this video instead dead and that drawback has to do with that Dynamic date property that I showed you if we go back into our clear inbox task right here and we edit it we can see that the only Dynamic options we have here for the due date are now and today and that presents us a problem because this template is going to be created on a schedule which means you can't look ahead in time and see which recurring tasks are coming up and are going to be due on days in the future on your schedule or on your calendar you have to rely on the page being created and the date being dynamically set to today which means you're only going to know the task is due on the day it's created now if you're fine with that then this solution can work perfectly well for you but if you're not fine with that then join me at level two so here we have the actual system that I use to run my life in notion it's called ultimate brain it's also a template that you can get in the description down below and in Ultimate brain I have a task manager with a custom system for processing and creating recurring tasks with a lot more flexibility than we had in level one so here I've got my clear email inbox task which I need to do after I finish filming this video and we can see we have that due property from before it's due today but there is also a next due property and I can see the next due date is tomorrow April 5th 2024 and that next due date is based off of the recur interval I've set here along with the recur unit and this day property here so just like before I have set this task up to recur on Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday my weekdays and it doesn't recur on my weekends so I'm going to show you how to set up a recurring task in just a second but essentially here at level two the way to actually process a recurring task to check it off as done is instead of checking the done box or setting a status property like this you just move the due property to whatever date is displayed in the next due property so if I move this from today to the 5th now it's due tomorrow and now I can see it is next due April 8th which is next Monday because again we're skipping our weekend days here now moving that due date to the next due date doesn't take a whole lot of work however personally I would want that to be automated for me and I would want to be able to actually check off my tasks or set my status from Todo to done and as a slight teaser for level three which is coming up very soon I have an automation that is extremely easy to set up and does exactly that for you so stick around for that but first and foremost how do we actually create these recurring tasks well let's first move over from this clear email inbox task which is already set up to this send newsletter task which currently is a onetime task we do not see that next due property here to turn it into recurring task all we actually have to do is set a recur interval so for send newsletter I would want it to be once a week so I'm going to go with one and just like that I have a next due date however I want to set my recur unit from empty which will default to just every day to weeks and now it's next due on April 11th and actually actually my newsletter would want to go out on Friday not on Thursday so I'm going to set that to tomorrow and the next due date is April 12th now another big advantage to doing recurring tasks this way is we've built a lot more recur unit types into the system than you can get with Notions repeating templates if we open up recur unit we have days weeks months but we also have months on the first weekday we have months on the last weekday we have months on the last day and we also have years in addition if I set this to days specifically I can also open up this day's property here and I can select these specific days that it's going to recur so if I wanted it to be a Monday Wednesday Friday task I would do this if I want it to be Monday and Friday only I could remove Wednesday and so on like I said earlier though I want this to be a weekly task so I'm just going to go ahead and get rid of these and set this back to once a week now you might have a couple of questions popping into your head number one how does this actually work and number two how can you get it into your own workspace well as you might have guessed if you've watched any of my other notion cont content on formulas there is a Formula that runs this recurring tasks setup in fact there are several including if we open up next du here what is probably the biggest notion formula you are ever going to see I have truly never seen a notion formula this big and this complicated and a huge amount of the credit for this formula goes to Martin on my team I built the original version of it in fact the first ever video on this channel was a notion recurring tasks video with a much simpler version of this formula and Martin has taken it to basically the Max and that is why we are able to support those recur units like last week day of the month and stuff like that so because this is so complicated there's no way that I could cover it in a tutorial so what I recommend doing instead is getting one of our templates that has all these formulas built in we have ultimate brain which is the exact productivity system that I use it also comes with a note taking system gold tracking system and a lot more you can learn more about that in the description down below that's a paid product though so if you want a free template we also have ultimate tasks which is my completely free task manager template comes with recurring task support just like this along with subtasks and a lot more features and if you really want to get your hands dirty we also have an advanced recurring tasks what I'll call proof of concept template it basically just comes with the exact formulas and uh recurring tasks properties that you would need so if you building your own system for personal use you could basically just recreate those properties copy and paste the formulas in and you would be good to go all those are linked in the description down below and in the article companion for this video I've have also pasted the formula code in the FAQ section in case you want to read it there so in just a second we're going to move on to level three but before we do I do want to mention that if you're using notion calendar you can also see these recurring tasks on your calendar and like I mentioned before using level two instead of those repeating templates from level one gives you the major advantage of being able to see your recurring tasks before the day that they're due so you can actually plan your week in advance now if you don't already know how to connect the database up to notion calendar so you can see its entries on your calendar I've covered that in a recent video and I will link to that in the description down below for now we are going to move on to level three so like I said before in level two we have to move the due date manually over to the next due date that's way too much work it's 2024 robots should be doing everything for us and we should live in a techno Utopia like it's Star Trek so let's take a little bit of a step towards that and automate this process of uh processing our automated tasks now in a video I made a couple years ago we used a platform called make.com to meticulously build a no code workflow that would do this for us and that took about 30 minutes of tutorial time in my video and a lot of people found that kind of tedious so I have been working to make this much easier and I basically created an automation that you can basically just click and create almost as if it was a notion template using a platform called pipe dream if you saw my video on taking notes with your voice you using Ai and a voice recorder app uh this is the exact same platform pip dream is my favorite platform for building automations uh namely because I can write code myself and then package it up and essentially share it to you as if it were software without having to launch my own software project although come to think of it I'm also doing that with fly lighter our Web Clipper for notion which is launching very soon but it's also cool to be able to build these automations and ship them really quickly using pip dream so in the description down below you're going to see a template link for this workflow if you click it it is going to automatically be created in your own pipe dream account and if you don't already have a pipe dream account it is completely free and it will prompt you to create one as you're going through the process U that link also exists here in the companion blog post for this video so I'm going to show you where it is here but you'll also find it in the YouTube description down below or the description of nebula if you're watching there so here in my little table of contents we have this automated recurring tasks with pipe dream section and there is this magical button right here which when you click it just creates the workflow in your pipe dream workspace so the first thing it's going to ask you after you're prompted to create an account if you don't already have one is uh to create a new project or to add it to an existing project I'm going to go ahead and create a brand new one and you can name it whatever you want maybe you'd name it notion automations I already have a project named that so I'm just going to call it notion recurring tasks I'm going to create that project and continue and then I think I'm also going to leave the name as the default as well now I happen to be recording this video while pipe dream is literally rolling out a brand new version of their Builder so here I can see open in New Builder beta and I am going to use that new builder for this video so it will be a bit more relevant to the Future as they launched this new Builder however you might see an older version of the Builder if you are watching this very near to this videoos publish date so I'm going to show a quick screenshot of what that looks like the actual process of setting this up is pretty much identical between them it's just the UI has changing a little bit so want to give you a heads up for that before we continue and I'm going to go ahead and click create work flow just like that so basically this brings in two different steps we have a trigger step and then we have an action step and the action step is about a thousand lines of JavaScript code that I wrote behind the scenes and all you have to do is fill out a few properties instead of essentially building the exact same thing that I've built for you which is why this is so much cooler than make.com or zappier so the first thing we need to do here is Define our trigger essentially this is going to run every single day at 11:57 p.m. and when it does it's going to look for any completed recurring task in your notion workspace so if you're using a status property anything that is set to done if you're using a checkbox property anything that's checked off it's going to find any tasks where those are done and the task is recurring and then it's going to process them it's going to uncheck the done check box set the status back to Todo and set the due date to the next due date that it needs to have now to set the trigger up for yourself the only thing you really need to do is come into this schedule a little drop down here and change your time zone from America Denver to whatever your time zone is so it actually runs at 11:57 p.m. uh for you in your time zone so once we do that we can hit save and continue and then for the purposes of this setup we have to generate a sample event once the workflow is actually live it'll just generate its own events on the schedule and then we can click continue so I'm going to click continue right there and now we have the notion recurring tasks action that I've built there are some instructions here I will let you read them if you want but the actual first thing you need to do is connect a notion account so I've already got an ocean account set up but I'm going to click connect new account to show you how this works and as you can see it brings up this little popup here with this little notion connection dialogue so the first thing you want to make sure is that the workspace you want to work in is selected here college and vek is the one I want to use so we're all good there and then we want to select pages to give pipe dream access to so in the case that you're using ultimate brain like I am down here with Thomas's brain or ultimate tasks I would recommend just choosing the top level ultimate tasks or ultimate brain page otherwise if you want to you can search for the exact tasks database that you're using and you can give pip dream access to that but if you do choose ultimate brain or ultimate tasks the permissions Cascade down to all the child pages and child databases so it's going to get access to that tasks database anyway so I'm going to go ahead and go with uh Thomas's brain right there allow access and then the next thing I need to do is Select my target database so right here I can see all tasks used for ultimate brain now the database name name is all tasks and then in the code I wrote for this workflow step I added the used for ultimate brain label there just to make things a little bit easier to see so I'm going to go with all tasks right here and then this little steps property is something that I brought in it basically just brings in data from the previous step so you can leave that there it just needs to have this exact value and then the first property we need to set is our due date property so because it's called due in Ultimate brain I'm going to go with do just like that and then I want to choose my task status property now another big upgrade from the previous video I made on automated recurring tasks is here in task status you will notice that we can choose checkbox type properties like we could before but we can also choose status properties like the con bond status property in Ultimate brain I'll bring that up really quick uh basically this right here and this is the property type that notion is essentially intending people to use for task management so going forward in templates that I build in the future and updates I make we're probably going to be using status properties more often than checkbox properties and I wanted to support this property type in this automation so back in pipe dream I'm going to go ahead and click combon status and once I do we're going to have a few more fields that load in first we have this not started status option and here I want to choose whatever property or option in My Chosen status property that represents not started so in my case it's Todo and then I also likewise want to choose the option that represents done and then you can see down here in final steps all we need to do is test this and then deploy it now before I hit test I want to make sure I have some checked off recurring tasks so I can see them get processed so let me go ahead and set this uh send newsletter task to done and let's also pretend that I cleared my email box I'll set that to d as well and then I'm going to pop over to my actual all tasks database because I've got a little custom table view here that shows these tasks and I'm just going to go ahead and check off done as well to show you what that optional secondary property does so when I head test I'm going to see these basically set themselves back to undone and then my due properties are going to set themselves to to what's displayed in next to let's go ahead and set the fireworks off go back to notion and there the API has done its magic so once we deploy the workflow this is going to happen on a schedule every single day so going back to pipe dream I can hit deploy and just like that my workflow is now live and it's now going to run at 11:57 p.m. every single day I could also hit run now here in pipe dream if I wanted to run it manually at any time but it's that automated nature that I was after and something else that I really wanted when I was setting this up was a report and slack every single day that would show me all the tasks that were processed and link to those tasks so that is something that I have set up for myself here I have this recurring tasks Channel and I get this cool little report every day that shows me all of these tasks that I have processed which are recurring so I want to show you quickly how you could do that because it's a great example of how you can actually extend your workflows in pipe dream and start learning how to use this incredibly powerful platform seriously this is one of my favorite platforms that I work with so if I go back and edit my workflow here these two steps are not what I'm limited to I can add additional action steps and they'll all be carried out one by one so here with this little plus button let me go ahead and add a slack step I'll choose the slack app and then the uh send message to a public Channel action here and first I'll connect my slack account which I've already connected I'm going to find my recurring tasks Channel by searching here and then for the text if I go back to my no recurring tasks step you will notice that in the exports tab here in this results section I have added a workflow report object and if you toggle that open there is both a markdown version and a slack version we need two because slack requires you to render links in a very weird way that is not standard markdown but if you're using slack you can easily click copy path right here and then if we go back to our little uh slack action here we can paste that path just like that and now if we test this out and go back to slack we should get another recurring task report there it is and we have send newsletter and clear email inbox we can see their next du and we can click on them to open them up in notion just like that so this is a great example of how you can start extending your workflows inside of pipe dream there are a lot of other things you could do you could send the report to Discord you could email yourself and uh in general you could add lots of actions to a single trigger to do pretty much whatever you want so to finish this up because I've made changes to this workflow I want to go ahead and deploy it one more time and now I'm going to get that slack report along with my processed recurring tasks automatically every single day so that my friends is at three levels how you can automatically process recurring tasks inside of notion and if you want to go further than just doing recurring task processing if you want to build a full productivity system inside of notion and get the exact same system that I use myself you can also check out my ultimate brain template not only does it have that task manager with the recurring task support subtask report and GTD support it also has a great note taking system with an inbox a favorite section a great way to tag and organize your notes it uses Thiago Forte's per organization system for whole life organization you can even track goals and do daily planning basically anything involving your personal productivity you can now run inside of notion with ultimate brain especially now that it connects to notion calendar which brings a great calendar app into your productivity system as well if you want to check it out you can go over to thomasj frank.com srain to learn more and if you want to get a copy for yourself and support the work I do on this channel you can even use the code let's go 2024 a checkout to get 50 bucks off of any version of the template and once you do have the template you're going to have access to our great beginners course with lots of lessons on how to set it up and how to boost your productivity and we also have notion certified support staff so if you have any questions if you get stuck or you want to extend your template and customize it my staff will be able to answer any questions you have once again Thomas J frank.com brain Link in the description down below and use that code let's go 2024 a checkout to get 50 bucks off now if you want to extend your knowledge of notion automations or add additional capabilities to your notion workflows here is a video on taking notes with your voice that also uses pipe dreams that'll show you some additional cool stuff you can do with pipe dream you have ai summarization of your voice notes full transcripts and if you want to learn notion automation yourself here is a 2-hour long notion API beginners course which will not only teach you the notion API but it'll also probably teach you how to code it is the culmination of my last two years of learning how to code myself and you even get to build a pokedex in notion so it's pretty fun

Channel: Thomas Frank Explains

Views: 31,163

Keywords: notion, notionhq, notion app, notion tips, how to use notion, notion productivity, notion templates, Notion Recurring Tasks, recurring tasks notion 2024, Notion Tasks 2024, notion repeating templates

Id: k_fG8pSt4kw

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024