help: trying to create a cycle of tasks

[Dwight]

Many of my tasks fall into a cycle. For example, I have about 13
things to do that should happen about once per quarter. I have
scheduled 13 tasks, one each week, each one recurring once every 91
days. It works great except . . .
Inevitably one of the tasks doesn't get done. When this happens, I
reschedule the task for one week later. I would like to find a way
that the other 12 tasks in the cycle each would get rescheduled one
week at the same time. The way I am doing it right now is time
consuming and mind numbing.

Ideally I would have (simplifying down to three tasks)
Task C is due 7 days after Task B is completed
Task B is due 7 days after Task A is completed
Task A is due June 1st and reoccurs 7 days after Task C is completed

I've been watching the "Advanced" recurrence behavior that says that
when one subtask is completed all tasks will regenerate. I can't
picture why anyone would need that behavior. I wonder if there's any
way to use it to support my cycle of tasks,

Any suggestion on how to set this up will be appreciated.

-Dwight

[Neal]

"Automatically recur when any subtask is complete" is used for rotations:

Clean room
 - Clean kitchen
 - Clean dining room
 - Clean living room

You work on only one room for the day, whichever room you work on gets completed and tomorrow you only get a list of the remaining rooms that still need to be cleaned.

That really isn't what you were looking for.  What you have asked for has been asked for in the past.   I think Lisa has asked for it a couple of times.

I think Lisa's example was wash clothes.  You don't want the task to dry clothes to show up until 40 minutes after wash clothes was completed. Sorry there really isn't a work around for that request.  At least not one that anyone has been able to present...

[Lisa Stroyan]

Mine was cleaning the guinea pig cage, 3 days after we air out the bedding. I did figure something out...I'll have to go look when I get a chance. I did try to get this to work for your scenario but haven't been successful yet. I've been playing with a fully nested set of tasks (each nested in the other) but it's not working the way I expect.

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:52 AM, Neal <nsch...@gmail.com> wrote:

"Automatically recur when any subtask is complete" is used for rotations:

Clean room
 - Clean kitchen
 - Clean dining room
 - Clean living room

--
Lisa Stroyan
www.empathic-parenting.com

[Dwight]

Thanks Neal & Lisa. With your help I've got this figured out. Assume I have seven maintenance tasks, and I need to perform one each week, so each one gets done once every seven weeks:

This solution
- Never shows more than one of the tasks in "active tasks"
- If I complete a task on time, none of these tasks will be active until next week when the next one will activate
- If I miss getting a task done it will show as overdue till I do it, then the next one will activate.
- If I get two weeks behind schedule and then finish a task, last week's task will activate already overdue
- If I get behind and don't want to make the effort to catch up, I click completion on the parent project enough times to bring it to today (or on Windows I can right-click the parent project and select "skip occurences", then select "skip all occurences up to today" and I end up with the task that's next to do, but its due this week.
- If I add another task,it just slips in wherever I pit it, and now each task reoccurs in eight weeks instead of seven
- If I need to reorder the tasks I can just do so by drag & drop and all of the scheduling and due dates fall into place
Best of all, all of this works on a phone version of MLO so I don't have to keep running back to Windows.

Here's the setup
1. create a task, named "Maintenance" or whatever.
2. Make it a project, with subtasks executed in order.
3. Set start date = this Monday and due date = this Friday, recurring every week.
4. advanced recurrence options: subtasks recurr when all completed, automatic recurring when any subtask completed
5. then add the subtasks, in the correct order
That's it.

My database contains a lot of tasks with recurrence every seven weeks (or every 42 days) or every 27 weeks. I could not get rid of almost all of them and use this task cycle instead. I would then be able to do almost all of my scheduling right on the phone (android) - the only remaining issue needing scheduling on Windows would be quarterly scheduling, and I can probably overcome that by creating a template for a task that reocurrs every 91 days.
-Dwight

[Bedrudin]

Dwight, Neal & Lisa

I'm working with recurring tasks intensively. Your idea and setup
description works great for me. Till now The feature for automatic
recurrence when any subtask is completed didn't make sense for me,bbut
with your idea its a further time I love MLO a little bit more.

Regards
Bedrudin