Recurring/repeating tasks

[arubinomunoz (Amalia Rubino)]

Hi everyone!

We’ve been inspired by all these comments about creating this feature and good news, we went and created the app! We’ve just launched Recurring Tasks, which now allows you to create recurring/repeating tasks in your monday.com boards. It´s currently in Beta so please download it, give it a try and we would love to know what you think. I’ll also be more than happy to directly feed it back to our team! If you want to book a chat with me directly, here’s my calendly: Calendly - Amalia Rubino Muñoz

Thanks,
Amalia

[fast_sapi]

Thank you Amalia
I have just tested you app and I am sorry to say, that this is not really a solution. What I - and I assume most of the people posting ere - need is a functionality to add tasks at certain dates. What you app does is flood my boards with dozens of tasks. E.g. when I say I need a task every year at a certain date, your app creates 65 tasks, with the latest of it dating year 2088. Now yes, it creates a task for every year, and yes, the dates are correct but to be honest I don’t really care today about a task in 2088 - but I will need this task to be created in 2088, should my company still exist then and still have this need.

[Javed (Javed Rahman)]

I agree unfortunately… why this simple feature needs to be made an app…

Planning on not moving my company and my friend’s to monday for this simple thing. Like how can a productivity platform not be able to turn a normal task into reoccurring? How?

[Javed (Javed Rahman)]

How many more years?

[MabRoj (Mabel Rojas)]

Dear @fast_sapi thank you very much for this feedback, it’s very important to us! My name is Mabel, part of the team who created the app Recurring Tasks.

We are targeting to implement this feature Choose (or automate) when the recurring tasks will be created in a soon release. We are working hard on what this feature could look like and to make it useful for you and others!

Could you please elaborate on when you need the recurring tasks to be created? When do you expect to see the recurring task: before the date of recurrence or on the same date of the recurrence? Where do you expect to see the recurring tasks once scheduled? and once created?
Please be as specific as you can; with this information, we will have a better understanding of the context. Thank you!

[MabRoj (Mabel Rojas)]

@hlopezvc @HPETRIE @PM_Karen @PaolaM @Marian @Javed
My name is Mabel, I am on the product team of Adaptavist, a software development company and a partner of Monday. Great to meet you, albeit virtually!

We’re conducting interviews to increase our understanding of your pain points and needs around recurring tasks. As active users of Monday, your experience is invaluable to us, and your feedback can help us shape a solution for you !

Would you be up for a 30-minute chat over Zoom? In exchange, you’ll receive a $50 gift card as a thank-you for participating.

Please click We'd love to hear everything about your needs of recurring tasks. | User Interviews
and we’ll do our best to be available.

You can reach me out here or at mhernandez@adaptavist.com. Thank you!

[fast_sapi]

Hello Mabel
Thanks for asking, it’s an important question! My opinion was, to have the task created at the date, when it starts. However, my accountant would love to see the task coming up before.
So I guess it would be best if a number X could be given (including zero): The task would then be written X days before the task starts. If user sets X=0, then the task is written the day it starts (like a reminder).
If my explanation was unclear, please feel free to let me know.
Thanks!

Example:
Recurring task
Every year
First time: 15. July 2023
Written X=60 days before
→ At May 16th a task will be written with start date range: 15. of July 2023

Does that make sense?

[psalani (Patrizia Salani Platt)]

This is exactly the simple fix we need to recurring tasks. The lack of this functionality is making me consider a new platform.

[Gauri (Kristelle (Gauri) Sim)]

This might be a long explanation, but here’s the workaround I did for our Facilities team who has regularly scheduled maintenance to do.

First, I had to create a separate board for these repeating tasks that would populate my targeted TASKS board, placing the newly created item into the TASKS Board when the date has been reached.

Each task line in this REPEATING TASKS board has a column for Desired Date, Every Month, Every 3 months, Every 4 months, Every 6 months and Every Year, plus a Scheduled [status] column (as well as Files and Assignment).
Then I had to create 5 automations for each recurring task segments of 1 month, 3 months, 4 months, 6 months and 1 year.

The automation is triggered by the Scheduled status set for each task.

For example, for an ‘every month’ trigger, the automation is:
“When EVERY MONTH arrives, create an item in [Target Board] and push Desired Date by 1 month and push [EVERY MONTH column] by 1 month.”

In the task line, I put the task name and then the date we want in the Desired Date and the Time Segment column. (We can also attach files and assign it to someone). Here’s how those key columns look:

Task 1:
Desired Date Every Month Scheduled
Jun 13 June 13 [Every Month]

Task 2:
Desired Date Every 3 Months Scheduled
September 25 September 25 [Every 3 Months]

When Desired Date arrives, the item goes to the target board with its files and assignment, and re-dates itself for the next time segment it has been given.

It’s a workaround I know, but it’s the only thing that will work for us until finally Monday.com gets this thing created. (Which has taken more than 5 years so far)

Gauri

[MabRoj (Mabel Rojas)]

Yes, thank you very much

[Julietteb (Juliette)]

Hi community! While this request is still under consideration, I wanted to highlight some helpful solutions that may solve your issue.
#1 - You are still able to use current automation functionality to create recurring tasks. Learn how here
#2 - After reading all the comments Adaptavist created an app in monday app marketplace, which allows you to create recurring/repeating tasks in your monday.com boards. Check it out!

We understand that they don’t always perfectly match your use case and needs, but hope these solutions can help in the meantime :).

[Maz (Maxine Winter)]

I’m afraid the workarounds have too many issues. Keeping templates to duplicate on the board or on a separate board has confused our team and created chaos when adding or amending tasks in different places.

There’s no way to effectively manage duplication of groups, individual tasks or whole boards, across the complexities of tasks moving between different groups as they’re worked on and recurrences needing to be scheduled for different frequencies.

I’ve given up on any kind of automation and have to manually trawl through various groups each week/month/quarter/year to find and duplicate the tasks that have to recur, then collate them into appropriate new groups.

The workarounds don’t work. Monday.com desperately needs a proper recurrence function.

[Piegood (George Adams)]

This isn’t a solution and shouldn’t be marked as such.
Regarding point 1, this is a messy solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist. The fix to this would be to allow status changes from a time period trigger.
This would mean you could mark an item as ‘Completed’ and then on the first of the month for example, change the status back to ‘To be completed’.

This allows for you to have a job, mark specific parts as completed, complete the entire job for the month and then have it reset so the same item can be used next month. It works for now but is far more clunky and uses more automations than I would like.

This is all we need until a proper recurring tasks option can be made available?

[E-CHQ (Elizabeth Allen-Pennebaker)]

I agree with the folx on this chat that the workarounds are not viable - certainly not for the number of client and client boards we have at our company. We’re probably going to leave Monday over this, which is sad because I like so many things about this platform and their customer service is terrific. But recurring tasks should be a no-brainer core feature of a project management platform…that fact that it is not there and that it can only kinda sorta maybe be achieved through advanced workarounds is just staggering.

[Danny-Workiflow (Danny Esquivel)]

Thanks so much Juliette! I think the recurring tasks is a big Value Add that should be integrated as many other competitors offer this in their specific OS. A client isn’t always looking forward to paying more just for an accessory functionality that is found basically everywhere else. Would love to see this prioritized as it will definitely help sell monday.com even more–especially since I think it’s one of the best tools out there

[WorkFlow (Christopher Jeffers)]

Not a fix. But toggle enabled item that generates a new task (could be in group or board) while enabled. This would work best on a board that controls admin task or functionality.

I have found that using a single control board helps reduce clutter and user input across multiple boards and the groups contained within. Hope it helps.

[arandomstring (M)]

To echo someone above: these aren’t solutions and shouldn’t be marked as such. It’s either rely on a third party for basic functionality that competitors offer baked in, or implement a tedious workaround that mostly gets the job done with a significant time penalty at scale - not great options.

Is any update available given that this request was made in 2020?

[rory (Rory Hochstein)]

Hi Monday.com, would you be against the the idea of modelling your recurring tasks feature after Asana? It takes less than 10 seconds for me to create a recurring task.

Thanks, Rory

[awolberg]

Adding to the chorus: in addition to the current workarounds being inadequate, the Adaptavist addon is hardly better. If I want to have an infinitely recurring task, the answer is to pre-create thousands of rows? And then if something needs to change about the task, I have to edit and/or delete all those rows? No thank you!

In addition, there should be an option to push a date to today plus x days/weeks/etc. If a recurring task is overdue, having the date push to a new due date that’s still in the past isn’t useful!

[JessicaWM (Jessica Wilcock)]

Currently doing with automation. But would be nice if more straightforward way to do without automation. Seems like basic functionality.