Repeat a task after you finish it, not on a fixed schedule

There are two kinds of repeat and most apps only ship one properly. On-schedule keeps a fixed rhythm: the 1st of every month, regardless of when you actually did it. After-completion counts from the day you tick it off. Watering the plants needs the second. Paying rent needs the first.

The two rules, and why the difference matters

Take one task: water the plants, every two weeks. It was due on the 1st and you got to it on the 5th.

Anchored to the schedule, the next one lands on the 15th. Being four days late did not move it, because the rhythm is the point — and if you are late often enough, you end up watering twice in three days to catch up with a calendar that does not care.

Anchored to completion, the next one lands on the 19th. Two weeks from when the plants were actually watered, which is the only thing the plants have an opinion about.

Both answers are correct. They are correct for different tasks, and that is the whole problem: an app that offers only one of them forces you to fake the other, usually by deleting the task and re-creating it with a new date. If you have ever done that, this page is about the thing you were working around.

What Todoist does

Todoist supports it, and does so more quietly than it should. Typing every 3 months counts from the original date. Typing every! 3 months — with an exclamation mark — counts from the day you completed it. In their words, completing a task set to every! 3 months "will set the next date to 3 months after the day you completed the task."

That is a real capability, and plenty of long-time Todoist users have never found it, because the difference between the two behaviours is one character inside a string you type.

The cost of expressing a rule as parsed text rather than as structure shows up later. What you get is not always what you meant, there is nothing to look at that confirms which anchor is in force, and changing it means editing the string rather than picking a different option. One related thing is widely misreported: a repeating Todoist task can also carry a deadline. Todoist advises against it — "for any task that needs to be repeated on a regular basis, add a recurring date instead of a deadline" — but documents the pairing working, with the deadline staying fixed while the recurring date moves. It is a recommendation, not a limit.

What Apple Reminders does

Reminders is more capable here than it is usually given credit for, and it is worth being precise because the internet is not.

It has custom repeats with hourly, daily, weekly and monthly frequencies and a numeric interval. It also has pattern rules: Apple documents that you can "make the event repeat according to a pattern (for example, on the last weekday of each month in which the event occurs)" by selecting On the and choosing from the menus. So "the last weekday of the month" and "the third Thursday" are both expressible. Anyone telling you Reminders cannot do nth-weekday repeats is wrong.

What it does not have is the anchor. Every repeat option Apple documents is schedule-based — an interval, a set of weekdays, or a pattern. None of them counts from the day you completed the task. That is the actual gap, it is narrower than the usual complaint, and it is the one that sends people to search for this in the first place.

The rules people actually need

Having built this twice, the list that covers almost everything real is shorter than it looks:

• nth weekday of the month — "the third Thursday"
• the last day of the month, and separately the last business day
• every N weeks, anchored to the day you complete it
• stop after N occurrences, or stop on a date
• skip one occurrence without breaking the series
• untick a completed one and have it genuinely undo

That last item is the one nobody lists and everybody hits. You tick something off, the series rolls forward, and then you realise you ticked the wrong task. In most apps the next occurrence has already been generated and the count has already advanced, so undoing means repairing state by hand.

How TaskPocket handles it

The anchor is a labelled choice — on a schedule or after completion — rather than punctuation, and the editor shows the rule back to you as a sentence before you save it. "Every 2 weeks after completion, until 30 June" is a thing you read, not a string you parse.

Unchecking a completed recurring task rolls the dates back, puts the count back up, and restores the checklist. It is an undo, not a new task that happens to look similar.

And a repeating task can carry a deadline as well as a start date, which is the case Todoist explicitly routes you away from — useful for the quarterly filing that recurs on a rhythm but is also genuinely due on a fixed day.

What this does not do

Being straight about the limits, because you would find them within a week:

• Nothing notifies you. TaskPocket has no reminders and no notifications on any platform. A repeat appears in Today on its day; it does not chase you. If a nudge is what makes a recurring task work for you, this is the wrong app and Reminders or Todoist is the right one.
• No last-business-day-excluding-holidays. The last business day rule knows about weekends, not about your country's public holidays.
• The deadline field is Premium. The repeat engine, including after-completion anchoring, is on the free plan in full.
• Natural-language editing of an existing task is limited. It reads text you append after the saved title; it will not re-parse a rule you rewrite in place. Changing a rule means using the repeat editor.