Ryan probably put it best in his OmniFocus 3 review for MacStories:

If you’re anything like me, you probably remain perpetually dissatisfied with your task management setup.

I couldn’t agree more and today I’ll focus on one specific gripe of mine: repeating tasks.

In general, I’m a fan of repeating tasks. According to 2Do, my current to-do app of choice, I have about 30 repeating tasks, ranging from things like vacuuming to updating servers to filing my taxes.

Most of these tasks have three key characteristics:

  1. No due date
    I don’t miss any deadline if I vacuum two days late.
  2. Dependent on the previous completion date
    If I vacuum late, the next vacuum day should shift accordingly.
  3. Can’t be completed at any point in time
    If I vacuumed yesterday, there’s no point in vacuuming today.

Things handles such tasks pretty elegantly:

Tasks show up in Things’s Today view on their start date. If you don’t complete a task, it’ll just stay there (without any scary overdue indicator). As soon as you complete it, Things will automatically create a new task with the start date set accordingly.

If I decide to vacuum early, I can just go into Things’s Upcoming view and complete the task early. Again, Things will automatically create a new task with the start date set accordingly.

Thankfully, 2Do behaves similarly, although Things feels quite a bit more intuitive.