Sometimes we have work that may need doing every month or so. Take, for example,writing a newsletter. 

This type of work may take a few days. Doing it tends to look like doing some of it, then putting it aside, then working on it again later, then putting it aside, etc. At some point it’s done, but it may not be clear how many sessions it would be until we get there.

In this way, simply writing a task that says “Draft newsletter” doesn’t quite work.It wouldn’t be done on the first day, but at the same time the task would have to sit there since it wasn’t done. But then the task would clog up the Today list. You now introduce the need to review your list for what you’d like to do, what you can’t do, etc, instead of having a list that just works. A feeling of irritation wells and we may even think of abandoning the list sensing its lack of help.

Also, in the case of the newsletter, I want the work to show up monthly.  Writing a task that repeats every month also does not work. Again, if I’m not yet done with it now, but I’ve done enough for today, I would have to leave the task sitting there.

To solve this issue, we can create a double cycle. 

Setting Up a Double Cycle

The setup for a double cycle is as follows

The task repeats by defer another by one day. Here’s a screenshot from the Repeat section in the Inspector:

Effectively, what this creates is a task in my today list that I can 

  1. Do a little of each day.
  2. Then, mark complete and have it appear again tomorrow.

When I am actually done with the newsletter, I’ve scheduled its release and there’s nothing more for me to do, the parenthetical “Defer 1 month when done” functions as the second wave in the cycle.

I’ll tap the “+1 month” tab:

Note September 4, 2019: This is the second version of this post.  Thank you to the commenters for pointing out the lack of clarity from the first version.  I had originally started an addendum, but then quickly realized I just had to rewrite the whole thing.