[gohnjanotis]

I'm a little confused about how "Repeat" works. I might be using it wrong but here is what I am trying to achieve:

I have an action that I want to "add" to OmniFocus every month to remind myself to do something. I set it (in the Inspector) to "Repeat every 1 Months." I was expecting that once I checked it, it would disappear, reappearing after a month, but instead it adds a completed item and remains visible.

With this behavior I don't understand why I would ever check it, instead of just leaving it up there all the time to remind myself. Is there any way to do what I'm trying to do? or is this a bug with the Repeat feature?

Thanks,

John

[Chris]

Did you set start and due dates? If you set them to be the same (e.g. today), I think you will get the behavior you want. Of course that also depends on what view you are using and what your filter settings are.

[MEP]

Any task that does not have a start date set, will automatically appear in your list. The start date is the trigger that makes things become visible. So set a start date for today (the day you complete the task), set the repeat to 1 month and then check it completed. This should create a new task with a start date one month from today (the day of completion). This new task will be greyed out inactive so it won't be visible in the context view.

[gohnjanotis]

That's exactly what I was trying to do. Thanks. I guess I just didn't understand start dates.

[coconino]

A couple of ways Repeat can work:

Setting the repeat function on a project causes the entire project to repeat based on the start or completion date, and there is no need to set repeats on any of the actions contained within the project. Checking off the actions within the project is not enough to invoke a repeat; the project itself must be marked manually as completed (green tick) before the repeat will occur. In OmniFocus, simply completing all the actions in a project isn't doesn't automatically complete the project.

On the other hand, a project can contain repeating actions without the project itself being a repeating project. In this case the repeat setting will create a new duplicate action within the project each time the repeat is invoked. This means that over time the project will contain increasing numbers of almost identical completed actions, with the only difference being the completed date.

It is worth experimenting with these different methods to see which is preferred, and it may be that each is suited to different types of projects or actions. For instance, a rolling shopping list might be handled as a single non-repeating project containing repeating actions, but a project for writing and sending Christmas cards (like I made today) would be best done as a repeating project.

Why not add auto-complete as an option for repeating projects only? That's where it makes some sense.

I could certainly use that as I have several multi-step projects I would like to see repeat again after the final step is finished.