Recurring Task Enhancements

[#1]

This time of year I find myself creating a lot(!) of recurring tasks as reminders for weekly, monthly, quarterly events for next year. I suspect more users would take advantage of recurring tasks if they were a bit easier to execute.

And I've finally documented a host of enhancements that are needed for recurring tasks as they currently function.

• During set-up of the taks, I'd like to assign the child tasks to a user without assigning the parent task, there is no reason to assign the parent task to someone when all the child tasks are assigned to them. And that parent task just becomes clutter in their work list
• Allow choice of child task suffix. Currently the suffix auto-populates as a sequential number. I wind up manually editing every task and changing that number to the planned completion date. I can see others potentially wanting to use something else as the suffix, planned start day perhaps
• Allow entry of both planned hours and duration while setting up the task (we use the Simple duration type). Currently if you enter planned hours only, those fill into the duration column on the task list and the planned hours are 0. If you enter both planned hours and duration days during setup, the days enter in the duration column, but the planned hours fill in as 0. Then when you manually change all the planned hours to what you want there, the duration auto-chages to a portion of a day equal to the hours you enter. So I wind up manually editing both the duration and the planned hours for every task.
  • You also can't change the duration or planned hours through a bulk edit of the child tasks - so still I wind up manually editing both the duration and the planned hours for every task.
• Allow setting something other than the start date of recurring tasks as well as a task constraint. For some tasks I want a must finish on task constraint and I'd like to set that as the recurring date. For example I want a 3 day duration that must finish every Friday, so I have to enter the start date as Wednesday. Manually edit the duration after the tasks have created, then bulk edit all the child tasks to change the constraint to must finish on.

I've found additional ideas regarding recurring tasks as well:

• Create recurring tasks via a template
• Create sets of recurring tasks
• Organizing recurring tasks
• Durations and planned hours on recurring tasks
• Creating recurring tasks on additional schedules
• Create child recurring tasks with custom forms
• Another variation on additional schedule options

[#2]

I agree with you, Heather! Reoccurring tasks could be so beneficial but it seems like I spend way too much time having to manually update and adjust tasks.

[#3]

I love all of these ideas. I'd also like them to behave more like Reminders on macOS and iOS, where the recurrences aren't generated until prior tasks are completed. This would prevent loads of future tasks showing up on a work list, making it much easier to parse through than the current method.

[#4]

We would like to add that we would like to be able to create recurring tasks as "Personal" tasks on our Work List (as well as within schedules). This way we can add reminders for monthly or weekly to-do items that aren't tied to a schedule, but we want to make sure we complete regularly (and on time).

[#5]

Hi,

This is really very useful idea and really need to update. Because in software development projects we needed such kind of arrangements. May be the development can refer many approaches fro software tool "JIRA".

Mvh

Kundan.

[#6]

Thank you for the submission! We think this is a good enhancement to the Workfront platform overall and this product area in particular!

Workfront currently prioritizes large-scale, foundational enhancements such as the new Reporting experience and changes to the core data model, so this item does not fit in our near-term roadmap. As such, I am marking this as Declined now, but we'll keep this in our backlog for the improvements for this area so that we can revisit the decision in the future.

[#7]

Agree!  I never assign a parent task because the subs are typically spread around across resources.  We don't do this for non-recurring tasks as well.

I'm finding Workfront is auto adjusting my durations in half (i.e. a 5 day duration for a recurring weekly task is auto adjusted to 2.5 days for some reason) and we figure it's tied to Simple Duration, but we need to select Simple Duration to be able to set up the planned duration and planned hours fields in the recurring task function.

I've been trying to troubleshoot these for several months and I am wondering if "fixed date" constraints would work or even assigning a duration in "weeks" instead of "days."  I have confirmed that the duration will still auto adjust if I use Must Start On or Must Finish on as the constraint.