Scheduling

A task can be scheduled two ways: give it a date — a deadline you must hit or a goal you’re aiming for — and have it repeat so it comes back when it’s due again. Both live here.

Dates

A task can carry a date — either a hard deadline or a softer goal. You add either one from the same + when pill, so you only set a date when a task actually needs one.

Adding a date: the when pill

A task with no date shows a + when pill. Tap it and you’re offered two choices:

• Deadline — opens a date picker. Pick the exact day the task must be done by, and the task shows a Due pill.
• Goal — opens a text field where you type your target. The task shows a Goal pill.

Once you’ve set a deadline or a goal, the + when pill is replaced by the matching Due or Goal pill.

Goals understand vague dates

The Goal field doesn’t need an exact date. Type something loose — “sometime”, “in a few weeks”, “before the end of the year” — and plan afoot reads it into a date for you, showing how it understood your words so you can check it. Use a goal for a target you want to pull toward without committing to a specific day.

Deadline or goal?

• Choose a Deadline when missing the day has real consequences — a bill, a flight, a hard cutoff.
• Choose a Goal when you want a date to aim for but a slip is survivable.

Changing or clearing a date

Tap the Due or Goal pill to change the date, or clear it to drop the date entirely — the task goes back to showing + when.

Repeating tasks

Some tasks come back: “water the plants”, “weekly review”, “pay rent”. Instead of recreating them, give a task a repeat schedule and plan afoot brings it back for you.

Setting a repeat

1. Open the task and tap the ↻ repeat pill.
2. Type how often in plain language — the field suggests “try ‘every other Friday’”.
3. Press Enter.

You don’t need any special syntax. Things like “every day”, “every Monday”, “weekly”, “every other Friday”, or “the first of the month” all work. Plan afoot shows how it understood you (for example ”↻ every 2 weeks on Friday”) so you can check it got the right idea.

If it can’t make sense of something, it’ll say “I didn’t get that” — try rephrasing. (Recurrence is understood in English only for now.)

How repeats behave

When you finish a repeating task it doesn’t disappear for good — and it doesn’t come straight back either. The card leaves the board and returns on its own schedule: the same task, reopened in your Queue on the day its rule next comes around. Until then it’s out of sight everywhere except the Scheduled view (open the menu and choose Scheduled), where you can see everything that’s waiting to come back — and bring one back early if you need it.

The timing follows your rule. A rule tied to a calendar anchor — “every Friday”, “the 1st of the month” — keeps its anchor, and the task comes back with a Due date on that day. A rule without an anchor — “every 3 days” — counts from the day you actually finished, and the task comes back with a Goal date. Either way a small #N pill counts how many times it has come around.

Repeat vs. lane cadence

Per-task repeat is about a single recurring task. If instead you want a whole column to refill or tidy itself on a schedule, that’s lane cadence — see The board.

Repeating a task vs. repeating a plan

A repeating task and a repeating plan behave the same way: finishing either one doesn’t bring it back right away — it reopens on its own schedule, the same task or plan, no copy made.

The difference is what returns. A repeating task brings back just itself. A repeating plan brings back the whole plan: every task in it that was done moves back to Queue alongside it, with dates rebased to the plan’s new occurrence. See Plans for repeating plans.

Dates and repeats also pair with dependencies, where one task waits on another.