Numbered repeating tasks
 

I'm a medical student, and I generally make a new project for each rotation or block I take. Within each project, there are several one-off tasks, and several repeating tasks. Some repeat on a time basis (log patient encounters every weekend or ever 5 days), and others are just linear (do 9 electronic cases before the end of the block).

For the latter, what I've been doing is to [LIST=1][*]make a task[*]cmd D (or C&P) to duplicate however many times[*]go back and manually number them sequentially[*]group them[*]set the group to linear[/LIST]
I [B]love[/B] the end product, as a quick glance at whichever perspective will only show me the available task in the group "case number 3" as well as any other available tasks in that project, without cluttering the other cases.

This workflow of duplicating and numbering the tasks that I want to group seems like it would be very easy to automate, but a few searches haven't turned up any evidence that anyone has written a script for it. Does anyone know of such a script or a quicker way to do this? I could probably just do some plaintext grep stuff in textwrangler and drag-and-drop the text, but this would sure be a handy applescript and seems like it would be simple enough.

Normally this isn't too arduous to do manually, but I'm about to embark on an endeavor that will likely have a group of around 240 such sequential tasks, and that sounds like a pain to do manually.

How about creating "template" projects?

Create a project once as you describe, and set it to "On Hold" so none of its actions show up in your contexts.

Then when you need a new instance of that project, copy the whole project and set the copy to active.

An alternative is to have the whole project repeat (start again) and set the project to complete when the last action is completed.

Thanks for the reply.

I don't see how that would accomplish what I'm hoping for, perhaps I didn't explain myself well. Every month or so, I start a new rotation and I'm frequently required to do a certain task a given number of times before the end of the rotation. The task and the number of times vary widely.

I like keeping track of these tasks in OF, including the repetition that I'm currently working on (e.g. "History and physical #3"). I don't think a project template would allow me to adjust how many repetitions of a given task I need to complete, nor would it number those tasks.

I'm trying to work on an applescript for this now. We'll see how it works out.

I went ahead and wrote an applescript to accomplish this task. Seems to work. Posted to my blog here:
[URL="http://www.n8henrie.com/2012/04/applescript-for-numbered-tasks-in.html"]http://www.n8henrie.com/2012/04/applescript-for-numbered-tasks-in.html[/URL]