Confused-- Want to set up a weekly repeating schedule

[Goldendog]

I am trying something easy first.
I want to set up a project that is my training schedule.
Each day of the week gets a different type of exercise which is the action. I want to set this weekly schedule up once and as I complete it for the week it auto generates for the next week. If I have to skip a day's task for what ever reason... Such as spending to much time figuring out how to use a new software program the task can be marked ??? what and a new one generated for the next week.

Also I want to be able to keep track of my time spent. Therefore at the end of a period of time I want to be able to see how many hours were spent training.

Is this possible? I saw I can export out to cvs format.

I do not understand the groups?

[Lizard]

There's a couple different ways to do it, depending on exactly what you want. Here's one approach:
1) Create your "Training" project, and set it up to repeat weekly from the assigned date. Set the start date to the beginning of this week. Make the project parallel. (that way if you skip Monday's training, Tuesday's will still be ready for you the next morning.)
2) Create an action in that project for each day of the week. I'll call them by the weekdays to make this explanation clearer, but you could name them by what activity you'll actually be doing. Set the start date for each to the beginning of that day this week. Go ahead and check off the ones you've already done for this week. So now you've got perhaps Monday-Thursday's actions checked off, and Friday-Sunday are still waiting for you. At the end of your week (Sunday night in my example), whether you've done all the trainings or not, mark the project itself complete. This will give you a fresh set of trainings for next week, without marking off the trainings you skipped.

When you want to see how much total training you've done, in project view, search for "training" in the toolbar search box, and all the projects but training will disappear. Turn on the filter bar (the sunglasses icon in the toolbar) and change the status drop-down to "Completed". Then you can quickly count up how many trainings you've done.

Hope that gets you started in the right direction.

[Goldendog]

Was messing around with this yesterday. Trying to make sense of when to use the start date, or a due date and where to place them on a project or the task.

I noticed that a new "training" project appeared with an alarm clock on it. Is that my ongoing training project?

I changed my training schedule to have the repeating occur on the project not the action. This is one example of few repeating schedules that I have. I exported the focus view of the training project to an excel spread sheet. With the notes! Excellent! I can create a column with the total time using the start and end dates. Except I get a weird date added in front of the calculated time: (3/31/08 8:06)-(3/31/08 7:00)= 1/1/04 1:06. Any suggestions. I can add up the time with this weird date.

Now my next question is about tracking time efficiently.
I am finding it annoying to have to manually change the start time.
Can I set it to fill with the current time stamp if I want like the complete does, which I can change?

I am starting to get the hang of this. Thank you so very much.