--- title: "How to set up a recurring task" description: "Set a repeat from the task editor or by typing it, choose whether it counts from the due date or the day you finish, and give it an end condition." canonical: https://taskpocket.io/help/recurring-tasks/ lastUpdated: 2026-09-01 --- 1. [Home](https://taskpocket.io/) 2. [Help](https://taskpocket.io/help/) 3. Recurring tasks # Setting up a recurring task Open a task, choose Repeat, and pick a rhythm. Two settings decide most of the behaviour: whether the next date counts from the scheduled date or from the day you tick it off, and whether the series ever ends. You can also type the rule instead — “every other tuesday until march”. By [Bohdan Stefaniuk](https://taskpocket.io/about/) Last updated 2026-09-01 ## Setting a repeat 1. Open the task and choose Repeat. 2. Pick the frequency — daily, weekly, monthly or yearly — and an interval, such as every 2 weeks. 3. Refine the pattern if you need to: specific weekdays, an nth weekday of the month (“the third Thursday”), a day of the month including the last day, or the last weekday of the month. 4. Choose the anchor: from the scheduled date, or from the day you complete it. This is the setting people most often want and most often miss. 5. Optionally set an end condition — after a number of times, or on a date. The editor shows the finished rule back to you as a sentence before you save. Read it; it is faster than discovering next month that “every 2 months” meant something else to the app than it did to you. ## Typing the rule instead Anywhere you can add a task you can type the rule into the title, and it is lifted out into a real repeat: - water the plants every 3 days - invoice on the last workday of the month - review the deck every other tuesday until march - deep clean every 3 months after completion It is a fixed grammar rather than a language model, so the same sentence always produces the same rule, and when it does not recognise something it leaves your words alone rather than guessing. A title like Weekly report deliberately sets no rule — that is a name, not an instruction. ## Which anchor you want From the scheduled date suits anything tied to a calendar — rent, a standup, a monthly report. The series keeps its rhythm whatever you do, which is the point: paying rent four days late does not move next month’s rent. From the day you complete it suits anything tied to the real world — changing a filter, watering plants, backing up a laptop. What matters is the gap since you last did it, not the date somebody once picked. Finish it eleven days late and the next one is a full interval from then. Picking the wrong one is the most common cause of a repeat that “keeps piling up”. See [recurrence anchor](https://taskpocket.io/glossary/recurrence-anchor/) for the term itself. ## Skipping one, and undoing a completion To miss a single occurrence without breaking the rule, use Skip to next from the task’s menu. The series advances one step and the rule is untouched. If you ticked something off by mistake, unticking it genuinely undoes the completion: the dates roll back, an end-after-N count goes back up, and a checklist you had cleared returns. That is more than most apps do — but see the limits below, because it does not work everywhere. ## Things that surprise people - A fixed-schedule repeat keeps its rhythm when you finish early. Complete Friday’s task on Wednesday and the next one is still a week after Friday, not a week after Wednesday. That is deliberate — the alternative drifts your rent forward every month — but it surprises people the first time. - Monthly repeats do not ratchet down. A task set to the 31st lands on 28 February and then on 31 March, because the rule remembers the 31st rather than the last date it used. - The last-business-day rule knows about weekends, not about public holidays. It has no idea where you live. - Skip is only in the web app. The iPhone app has no skip action yet, so a repeat you want to miss has to wait until you are at a browser. - Undo is web-only and online-only, and it cannot undo the very last occurrence of a series that has just ended — at that point the rule is gone, so unticking gives you a plain task back rather than the series. - Editing an existing task’s title only reads text you add after the saved title. Rewriting the rule in place will not re-parse it; use the Repeat editor. - Nothing notifies you when a repeat comes due. TaskPocket has no reminders on any platform — a repeat appears in Today on its day and waits. ## Questions people ask ### Where is the repeat setting? Open the task and choose Repeat. You can also type the rule into the title when you create the task — "every 3 days" is enough — and it becomes a real repeat with the words removed from the title. ### Can a repeating task have a deadline as well? Yes. A repeating task can carry a deadline alongside its start date, and the deadline moves with the series, keeping the same gap. The deadline field is part of Premium. Things 3 and Todoist both allow this too, so it is not unusual — in Todoist the deadline stays fixed while the rhythm moves, so it needs resetting each cycle. ### How do I stop a repeat? Either set an end condition when you create it — after a number of times, or on a date — or open the task later and turn Repeat off. Turning it off leaves the current task in place as a normal one. ### Is any of this behind Premium? No. The whole repeat engine is on the free plan: both anchors, the end conditions, skip and undo. The only related thing that is Premium is the deadline field, if you want a repeating task to also carry a hard cutoff. ## Sources 1. [RFC 5545 — iCalendar recurrence rules, the standard behind every app’s repeat model](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545#section-3.3.10) checked 2026-09-01 2. [Cultured Code — Repeating to-dos in Things 3, for comparison](https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/2803564/) checked 2026-09-01 ## Related reading - [Recurring tasks: common problems](https://taskpocket.io/help/recurring-tasks/faq/) — Why a repeat stopped, why the next one landed on the wrong day, why finishing early did not move it, and what happens when you untick one by mistake. - [Recurring tasks that survive real life](https://taskpocket.io/features/recurring-tasks/) — 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. - [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. - [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.