- Background
- Thomas Franks PARA template
- Recurring tasks are a pain
- Rrule has solved this problem
- Build
- Notion databases
- Task
- RRule
- Pipedream workflow
- Benefits of the approach
- You can do some really complex recurrence patterns
- Grouping tasks by recurrence can be more useful than you might think (probably possible with other means too)
- Simplicity
- How do I write a new recurrence rule?
- ChatGPT
- Drawbacks
- I Don’t particularly recommend Notion as a task database. It’s terrible at quick capture. But in being able to create and customize a full framework for my workflow, it’s second to none
- No way to trigger a recalc immediately as Notion doesn’t have any sort of realtime webhook. Maybe they will eventually.
Intro
I’ve used Tiago Forte’s PARA framework for organizing my digital life for a few years now. I’ve found it immensely helpful to have a framework that can be applied to just about any system.
While PARA doesn’t aim to be a framework for managing work (but rather just a way to organize information), it certainly lends itself to be extended to that use case, given that the first letter in PARA stands for Projects.
Being invested in Notion as my central hub for knowledge management, I went through a few iterations of what PARA looks like in my workspace, but eventually landed on Thomas Frank’s PARA Dashboard template. It’s a solid template…
Managing recurring tasks through formulas is error prone. These formulas are huge. If something wasn’t working, I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one to figure out why.
Overview
This approach has 3 primary components:
- A Notion task database
- Notion recurrence rule database — writing RRules is tedious. This will allow us to define a rule once, give it a readable name, and leverage it on multiple recurring tasks.
- Pipedream workflow for calculating and updating the next recurrence date on a task
And how they relate—a task is linked to a recurrence rule. The workflow runs daily, picks up all completed tasks, calculates their next recurrence date, sets the task back to “todo” status and updates the due date to the calculated date.