[rllewis@mac.com]

I have an item that repeats every Saturday: pay bills. When I am finished with the todo, I'd like to delete it rather than mark it as 'done'. If I mark it as 'done', then after a while, I'll get hundreds of meaningless 'pay bills' todos clogging up my file (even thought they're hidden). However, if I delete the todo, it deletes all future repeating events of that todo. Suggestions? In Things, if I delete a repeating todo, it only deletes that particular occurrence, not all future ones.

[whpalmer4]

Mark it done, then delete it. Marking it done is what creates the next one.

[rllewis@mac.com]

Thanks. Though it seems very dangerous that future repeating events can so easily be deleted by an absent minded delete of one occurrence of the event.

[Brian]

I believe we've got a feature request open for an (optional, of course) "are you sure you want to delete X" step. I think we also have a feature request open for something along the lines of the Trash, if that would be preferable. Delete would just move something to a special list in your database that was kept separate from your active tasks. Maybe that would be preferable?

Either way, if you'd like something along those lines, email our support ninjas and they can attach your email to that item in the development database. Thanks!

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by rllewis@mac.com

Thanks. Though it seems very dangerous that future repeating events can so easily be deleted by an absent minded delete of one occurrence of the event.

No more so than that an important one-off item might also be deleted.

The number of times I have accidentally deleted something (deleting without intent to delete) is pretty small. Count of times I have deleted the wrong thing is a bit higher, but if you stick to the rule of not deleting anything not marked completed, that isn't likely to be a big problem either. Perhaps safest of all would be to simply not delete, and let the Archive facility keep your database pruned of old completed actions.

[pjb]

If the task that is being repeated is deleted then there is no repeating task. The future task does not exist until the present task is completed. If the future tasks persisted you would never be able to cancel a future repeating task. In my banking program (moneyGuru) and likely all others, recurring task/entry patterns exist separately and can persist and be deleted independent of actual entries. Perhaps you were expecting this kind of behavior.

The OF way: give yourself a task to once every N months to use File/Move Old Data to Archive. Alternatively, create a Perspective to show just the completed items, link to that in a repeating task, then periodically open it, select all and delete.