If you don't want to see an action before some date in the future, the start date is your friend. Similarly, if you want to see an action turn red if you haven't completed it by a certain date, the due date is your friend. Best of all, you can be friends with both of them at the same time :-)
Have a look at this thread:
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=20329
It sounds like you have an action you need to do sometime this year, and again sometime next year, and so on, but the only constraint is that it needs to happen sometime between New Year's Day and New Year's Eve, and it would be okay to do it Dec 31 2011 and then again Jan 1 2012 so long as it wasn't offered to you again for the rest of the year? If so, I would suggest a start date of Jan 1 2011, a due date of Dec 31 2011, with repeat every 1 year as the repeat policy.
A few things to note:
- Behavior with leap years can be a little bit surprising at first glance, as next year's action in this case will be shown as starting a day late (so that the start date will still be the same interval before the due date as it is this year). Subsequent non-leap years would go back to Jan 1/Dec 31 correctly. This adjustment of the dates only happens if the leap day falls between the start and due dates.
- You can't directly enter a repeat interval of a year on the iPad; the largest unit available for input is the month, although if you enter a year on the Mac, the iPad will use it correctly. Entering 12 months seems to work properly in the cases I tried. Yeah, I know this is the Mac forum, I'm just covering all the bases for when an iPad user asks a similar question :-)