---
title: "Recurring tasks that survive real life"
description: "Nth weekday, the last business day, stop after ten, skip one, and repeats counted from the day you finish. What each app can express, with sources."
canonical: https://taskpocket.io/features/recurring-tasks/
lastUpdated: 2026-09-01
---
1. [Home](https://taskpocket.io/)
2. [Features](https://taskpocket.io/features/)
3. Recurring tasks

# Repeats that survive real life

A repeat rule has to answer four questions: how often, counted from what, when to stop, and what happens if you are late. Most task apps answer the first well and the rest badly. TaskPocket answers all four, and the whole engine is on the free plan.

By [Bohdan Stefaniuk](https://taskpocket.io/about/) Last updated 2026-09-01

## Where repeat rules usually run out

Setting up a repeat is easy in every app. Living with one for a year is where the differences show, and they show in the same four places every time.

- What it counts from. Two weeks after it was due, or two weeks after you actually did it? Both are correct for different tasks, and an app with only one forces you to fake the other. This is the deepest of the four and it has its own page — [repeating after completion](https://taskpocket.io/guides/recurring-tasks-after-completion/).
- When it stops. Twelve physiotherapy sessions. Six months of a course. A trial you want to review before it renews. If the only way to end a repeat is to remember to delete it, you will forget, and it will keep appearing.
- Skipping one. You are away this week. You want to miss this occurrence, not break the series and not mark work done that was not done.
- Undoing a mistake. You tick the wrong thing. The series has already rolled forward and the count has already advanced, so putting it back means repairing state by hand.

## The rules you can express

Frequency is the easy half: every N days, weeks, months or years. The useful half is everything around it.

- Nth weekday — the third Thursday, the second Monday, the last Friday.
- The last day of the month, and separately the last business day, which is the one payroll and invoicing actually need.
- A day of the month, including the 31st, handled in months that do not have one.
- An anchor — on a schedule, or after completion.
- An end condition — stop after a set number of times, or stop on a date.

The editor shows the rule back as a sentence before you save it. “Every 2 weeks after completion, 12 times” is something you read and check, rather than a string you hope parsed the way you meant.

## The editor itself

This is the real thing, not a picture of it. Change anything — the line underneath is the app's own summary of the rule you just built.

Repeat

Repeat every

On

Repeats

Ends

## Being late, and being wrong

Finish a task four days late and an after-completion repeat counts from the day you finished, not the day it was due — so a fortnightly job stays fortnightly instead of quietly compressing into a week.

Unchecking a completed repeat genuinely undoes it. The dates roll back, the occurrence count goes back up, and the checklist returns to how it was. It is an undo rather than a new task that resembles the old one, which matters because ticking the wrong row is the single most common mistake anyone makes in a task app.

A repeating task can also carry a [deadline](https://taskpocket.io/features/start-dates-and-deadlines/) as well as a start date — the quarterly filing that recurs on a rhythm but is genuinely due on a fixed day.

## What each app can actually express

Worth being accurate, because this topic attracts more confident wrong claims than any other in the category — and because it moves. Two are common and both are wrong: Things 3 is not weak at repeats, and Apple Reminders does do nth-weekday patterns. Things 3.23, on 19 August 2026, closed most of what was left.

*Which recurrence rules each app can express, from each vendor's own documentation*

| Feature | Todoist | Things 3 | TickTick | Apple Reminders | TaskPocket |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Every N days / weeks / months | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nth weekday of the month | Yes | Yes 1 | Unknown 2 | Yes 3 | Yes |
| Last business day of the month | Yes 4 | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown | Yes |
| Counted from the day you finish | Yes 5 | Yes 6 | Yes 7 | No 8 | Yes 9 |
| Stop on an end date | Yes 10 | No 11 | Yes 12 | Unknown | Yes |
| Stop after N occurrences | Unknown 13 | No 14 | Yes 15 | Unknown | Yes |
| Complete a repeat early | Unknown | Yes 16 | Unknown 17 | Unknown | Yes 18 |
| Skip one occurrence | No 19 | Partial 20 | Yes 21 | Unknown | Yes |
| A deadline on a repeating task | Partial 22 | Yes 23 | No 24 | No | Yes |

1. Cultured Code: "every 3rd Tuesday each month".
2. Not documented either way.
3. Apple’s "On the" pattern, e.g. the last weekday of the month.
4. "every last workday".
5. Through an "every!" prefix inside the typed date string, rather than as a structured option.
6. A labelled option: "After Completion".
7. A labelled Custom Repeat type: "By Completion Date".
8. Every documented option is schedule-based.
9. A labelled option, with the rule shown back as a sentence.
10. "everyday ending aug 3", "everyday for 3 weeks".
11. Not documented. A template can be paused or stopped instead.
12. "Repeat Ends On".
13. Not documented, though end dates are.
14. Not documented.
15. "Repeat Ends After xx times".
16. Since 3.23, August 2026: a regular checkbox, plus Repeat → Create Next Copy.
17. Future occurrences are locked until the current one is completed.
18. Ticking it any day advances the series; a fixed schedule keeps its rhythm rather than shifting to the early date.
19. Documented as unsupported — "every day except" is rejected. Rescheduling one occurrence by hand is the offered alternative.
20. Since 3.23, "Make Exception" moves a single copy without changing the rule — most of what skipping is for, though not a discard.
21. "Skip the recurrence", by swipe or right-click.
22. Allowed and documented, but the deadline stays fixed while the recurring date moves, so it is reset by hand each cycle.
23. An "Add deadlines" checkbox on the repeating template.
24. TickTick has no deadline field distinct from the due date.

Where a cell says Unknown, the vendor does not document the behaviour and we have not verified it in the product. It is not a claim that the feature is missing — a page that guesses on someone else's behalf is a page you should stop trusting.

A No needs more than silence, so it is used in one of two situations: the vendor says the thing is unsupported, or the vendor publishes what they present as the complete set of options and the behaviour is not among them. Things 3's end conditions are the second kind — Cultured Code list Pause and Stop as the ways a repeat ends. Todoist's missing occurrence count is the first kind of silence rather than the second, which is why it reads Unknown while Things 3 reads No on what looks like the same evidence.

The honest summary, and it is narrower than it was a month ago: the anchor is not a differentiator at all any more. Todoist and Things 3 both do after-completion, Things does it as a labelled option, and its 3.23 release in August 2026 added completing a repeat early and moving a single occurrence without touching the rule. If you are on Apple hardware and recurrence is what you care about, Things 3 is an excellent answer and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

Todoist is stronger here than it is usually given credit for too: it does ordinal weekdays, “every last workday”, and end dates like “everyday ending aug 3”. And TickTick is the strongest of the four — it documents completion-anchored repeats, both end conditions, and skipping an occurrence outright. Between them, everything people mean by a good repeat engine is covered by somebody.

Which leads to the honest conclusion: no row in that table belongs to TaskPocket alone. Every capability in the repeat engine is matched by at least one of the four.

The nearest thing to an edge is narrow and shared. An end condition — stopping after six times, or on a date — is missing from Things 3, which documents only Pause and Stop; TickTick has both and Todoist has end dates. A deadline on a repeating task is missing from TickTick, which has no deadline field at all, and from Reminders, which has one date for everything — but Things 3 and Todoist both do it.

What is actually left is how the rules are expressed rather than which ones exist: a labelled option and a plain-English sentence read back to you before saving, rather than punctuation inside a parsed string. That is a preference, not an advantage. The reason to read this table is to find out whether the rule you need exists at all — in any of them.

## What this doesn't do

- No notification when a repeat comes due. TaskPocket has no reminders and no notifications on any platform, so a repeat appears in Today on its day and waits there.
- The last-business-day rule knows about weekends, not about your country’s public holidays.
- Natural-language editing of an existing task only reads text you append after the saved title — it will not re-parse a rule you rewrite in place. Use the repeat editor to change one.
- No dependency between repeats — nothing can start one series when another finishes.
- The deadline field a repeating task can carry is Premium, though the repeat engine itself is free.
- Skipping an occurrence is on the web app only. The iPhone app has no skip action, so a repeat you want to miss has to wait until you are at a browser.
- Undo works on the web and only while online — offline and mobile completions do not roll a repeat back. It also cannot undo the *final* occurrence of a series that has just ended, and a checklist item you renamed between occurrences keeps its current state rather than being restored.

## Questions people ask

### Can a task repeat after I complete it rather than on a schedule?

Yes, and it is a labelled option rather than a syntax trick — you pick "after completion" and the editor shows the resulting rule back as a sentence. Todoist can do this with an "every!" prefix and Things 3 has it as a first-class option too; Apple Reminders does not.

### Can I stop a repeating task after a set number of times?

Yes — stop after N occurrences or stop on a date. Of the four apps compared here, only Things 3 is documented as lacking it: Cultured Code offer Pause and Stop on the template instead. TickTick has both, and Todoist has end dates.

### What happens if I complete a recurring task by mistake?

Unchecking it genuinely undoes it. The dates roll back, the occurrence count goes back up and the checklist returns. It is an undo, not a new task that looks like the old one.

### Can I skip one occurrence without breaking the series?

Yes. Skipping advances the series to the next occurrence without recording work you did not do, which matters if you also use the completed history as a record.

### Is the repeat engine part of the free plan?

Yes, all of it — every rule on this page, with no card. The only recurrence-adjacent thing behind Premium is the deadline field, if you want a repeating task to also carry a hard cutoff.

### Does TaskPocket remind me when a repeating task is due?

No. There are no reminders and no notifications on any platform yet. A repeat appears in Today on its day and waits for you. If a nudge is what makes recurring tasks work for you, this is the thing to weigh before anything else.

## Sources

1. [Cultured Code — Using Repeating To-Dos (After Completion vs Regularly, nth weekday)](https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/2803564/) checked 2026-09-01
2. [Cultured Code — Repeating To-Dos, Refined (Things 3.23, August 2026)](https://culturedcode.com/things/blog/2026/08/repeating-to-dos-refined/) checked 2026-09-01
3. [Todoist — Introduction to recurring dates (the "every!" prefix)](https://www.todoist.com/help/articles/introduction-to-recurring-dates-YUYVJJAV) checked 2026-09-01
4. [Todoist — Introduction to deadlines (plan availability, and the guidance on recurring dates)](https://www.todoist.com/help/articles/introduction-to-deadlines-uMqbSLM6U) checked 2026-09-01
5. [Apple — Add dates or locations to reminders (the full custom repeat option list)](https://support.apple.com/guide/reminders/add-dates-or-locations-to-reminders-remnd4b206fb/mac) checked 2026-09-01

The repeat engine is free in full — both anchors, the end conditions, skip and undo. Only the deadline a repeat can carry is Premium, and skip and undo are web-only for now.

## Related reading

- [Repeat a task after you finish it, not on a fixed schedule](https://taskpocket.io/guides/recurring-tasks-after-completion/) — "Every 2 weeks" and "2 weeks after I last did it" are different rules. Here is why most task apps only do the first, and what to do about it.
- [Recurrence anchor — what a repeat counts from](https://taskpocket.io/glossary/recurrence-anchor/) — A recurrence anchor is the date a repeating task counts from: either the scheduled date, or the day you actually finished it. The difference matters.
- [Start dates and deadlines — two dates, two questions](https://taskpocket.io/features/start-dates-and-deadlines/) — When you plan to start and when it is actually due are different questions. Here is how the two dates work in TaskPocket, and which apps have both.
- [Apple Reminders alternative for Windows and the web](https://taskpocket.io/alternatives/apple-reminders/) — Reminders is great at capture and weak at structure. An honest comparison, including the several places where Reminders is still the better choice.