To-Do app that repeats tasks weekly even though tasks are completed for the day

Question

The requirement

A To-Do list, that repeats given set of tasks weekly. Marking the task as done won't hinder/stop the recurrence and it would still show up the next week. It will only be marked as done for the given day.

Some insight into the requirement

I am preparing for an examination which requires me to mug up loads of data. To remember and recollect most of it, I need to revise them weekly.

I am not sure as to which catagory of software would suit me better, a calendar, a TO-DO list software or any thing close to it.

I need a software which allows me to save topics that I studied (plain-text) today and it would be reminded about those topics every 7 days, indefinitely.

Currently, I am doing this with Rainlendar. Although, it does solve the 7-day recurrence problem, I require a cleaner interface. Right now, I just enter the topics in the notes section for the event and hover over the day's event to get the topics to revise.

I tried Google Keep but marking the task as done for the day will mark it done forever. I need it to reappear the next week as well.

Some low priority requirements

• should be available offline
• Desktop app preferred
• simple interface

Please advise.

Answer 1

I am not sure the requirements you listed are the best fit for what I believe your trying to accomplish.

If you want to memorize lots of information a better tool for that purpose is Anki:

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it's a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

Anki is a flash card application with enhanced smarts around Spaced Repetition. From Wikipedia:

Spaced repetition is a learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect.

Basically Anki shows you things you have difficulty remembering more often than things which you remember easily, tries to throttle how many new things your exposed to at a time vs things you have seen before, and does a great job of really helping your memorize anything you want to without the mental repetitive stress injury of looking at lots of cards, most of which you remember easily and don't need to review.

Anki will track how easily you remember each individual card and take care of timing when you need to review that card again instead of using something like a calendar reminder to tell you to review a consistent set of things.

Anki also has a great community that has contributed many decks of cards, some of which might contain the information your trying to memorize.

Answer 2

It doesn't meet the requirements you listed as low priority (unless you count the iPhone app or Android app versions) but Nirvana is a web application that does exactly what your asking for.

Nirvana is a very GTD focused to do application, the best out of all the ones I have tried (wunderlist, toodledo, remeber the milk, todoist, nozbe, google tasks, taskwarrior, etc.).

One of its features that I use each week is to schedule myself a repeating Payroll task for each Monday.

In the screen shots below you can see how this is configured in Nirvana.

Answer 3

As already mentioned by Chris Magnuson, taskwarrior could be used to satisfy your requirements. It allows you to:

Marking the task as done won't hinder/stop the recurrence and it would still show up the next week.

1. Add recurrent tasks from a single parent task. (The child tasks are spawned from the parent task over the recurrent period with the frequency you chose. You mark the child tasks done, leaving the parent task in tact (until its period is over, it is not longer needed)).

should be available offline

2. It is available offline, you can run it on your own pc, on a linux, or on a Windows with the app WSL (Install once then you can use it offline). I am not sure, though I assume it is also available on Mac.

Desktop app preferred

2. Normally a terminal command is used. On windows the terminal command consists of the WLS app (or cygwin if you want to also host it on an opensource platform for linux emulation). (For completeness there are also android apps with which you can sync your taskwarrior between desktop and phone.

simple interface

3. I assume most app users won't consider terminal a "simple interface". Perhaps that differs on this site, but just in case, here is a more intuitive/simple gui for taskwarrior that helps you scheduling.

Disclaimer, I am involved in the development of the following software:

Here is a repository that is tailor made to facilitate course planning. It consists of a strategically locked excel file that: 0. Guides you to fill in your tasks for a specific course, e.g. practice old exams, make presentations, exercises etc and when they are due.

1. Next it generates the taskwarrior commands based on the excel sheet you filled in.
2. If you use this repository to install taskwarrior, that also installs a taskwarrior hook that syncs tasks automatically with your calendar, you can sync your tasks automatically with google calendar.
3. Also the repository automatically generates latex templates for the old exam solutions that you intend to make.
4. A nice thing is that taskwarrior automatically computes what is the most urgent task based on a simple polynomial, which I found very practical to determine what I need to do next.
5. The best feature is that you can use the allocation column in the excel sheet to distribute workload collectively and (pseudo)anonymously. Also the produced solutions can be improved through collaboration in private gits.

Note on these last two suggestions, the projects are currently/not yet user friendly since they still contain a lot of bugs.