The ability to set task recurrence without having to get into the formulas would be amazing for new users like me. I’d like to do all my task management within Coda, but being new makes it hard to find an easy formula that works to make it possible to have tasks repeat in one of the following ways after being marked as done: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, 6-month, or yearly.
I was looking into implementing a pack like this for a different reason, but I would be curious to know your use case. What exactly would it mean for a task to “repeat” weekly? Is it a matter of creating a new task row scheduled for the next week? Changing the due date of the current task to the next week? Having a field like “next recurrence”?
Personally, I like the idea of seeing the due date coming up and then the next recurrence. I also like the idea of have it make a new row (duplicate the current row and change it when it so any notes I take will copy over, or change depending on the date of the task). For example, maybe this week I have notes about what I did when I was answering emails that I want to record in that row, and then tomorrow, I have different notes that I need to be related to that task.
Take a look at this example doc: Tasks · Recurring Tasks which uses this pack for recurrences: Recurrence Rule Pack, extend Coda with Recurrence... | Coda
The pack supports fairly complex recurrences, but also supports the basic ones (with a nice option to automatically parse free form text like “Every month on the 2nd last Friday for 7 times” into a recurrence).
From the created recurrence rules it is easy to get the first occurrence, the next occurrence after a specific date, all occurrences, the occurrences between two dates (and more) with the First(), After(), All(), and Between() formulas.
There’s also a “Create next recurrence” column which is a button that creates a new row in the table that is a copy of thisRow with the Due date set to its Next recurrence date. The Next recurrence column of the new row automatically becomes the second next recurrence, and so on. The Mark as done column does the same, but also sets the Status to “Done”.
All that’s missing from that doc is maybe having the recurrences generated by an automation instead, which cannot be shared in published docs but shouldn’t be too tricky to implement. This would just run at some specified frequency, maybe daily, and check that for every completed task, it has its next recurrence created (there is a handy checkbox column Next recurrence created for each row). If not, it would press the Create next recurrence button for that row.
@loucadufault thanks for this - I’ll take a look! I’ve since gotten a bit better at formulas and found some helpful YouTube videos, but for anyone who builds packs, I think this could be a great feature.
1 Like
For something as basic as repetitive tasks, there should be simple tools rather than database development and programming.
Coda is not a task management app but rather is “database development and programming” (of a sort.) So it’s not expected of it to have out of the box ‘recurring tasks’ support — in fact, there’s no concept of ‘tasks’ in Coda at all. There are only ‘tasks’ if you make a database table and maybe call it Tasks or DB Tasks, and decide it’s your table of tasks and every row describes a task.
If you want to have your row duplicated at certain times (i.e. the way ‘recurrence’ is done in Notion), in Coda you can set up an automation for that.
Generally, there are many ways to handle recurrence. But the simplest is perhaps to just calculate the next occurence date/time for each task and when the task is marked done, reschedule it to the next calculated date.
1 Like
The advertising shows tasks and there is an expectation that there are basic functions for working with them. No one is asking to add a mind-reading task organizer, but simple things, instead, users are directed to explore formulas and databases 
There is an impression that development has slowed down, investments have been attracted, ordinary users and their wishes are no longer so important. I hope I’m wrong.
1 Like
Well, Coda is always lowering the floor for use cases like that. A while ago it was only possible to set up a filter with a formula; not so while ago you had to use formulas to e.g. add a column from the relation. Both of these things you can do with clicky UI now. So maybe one day we’re getting something for tasks and recurrence specifically 
That said, task tracking is just one of the many applications of Coda. And the fact that it’s in the promo gif is perhaps only to deliver the understanding that, aha, this tool can be used for task tracking, stand up meetings, project briefs and so on. But it doesn’t single out the ‘tasks’ part. It’s like any app building platform — it’s versatile and you can do whatever workflow you need. You don’t ask e.g. Node.JS to have a built-in thing for recurring tasks 
Might sound a little pretentious but unfortunately I see this to be true all the time. You cannot really succeed with Coda if having to learn a bit of formulas and databases already feels hard for you. If you feel absolutely strongly about learning formulas and databases, maybe a better and less struggle-ful idea would be to just adopt a dedicated task tracking app. Again, think of it as finding the app vs learning some programming language and developing yourself the app. You’d only put the effort in the latter if you need an absolutely custom thing that no existing app solves.
I honestly don’t see how ‘recurring tasks’ would fit in with the overall agnostic design of Coda.
4 Likes
Unfortunately this recurring tasks and granular permission (per each field/column for view/edit) is the reason we now operate all task.project management in SmartSuite =(. If only Coda brings those in a same manner we can 100% operate in Coda. But at this time, we want focus more on doing actual job which for us is consulting, business, marketing, ecommerce and making money than digging and playing around trying to figure out a walk around. For many other things, Coda is still awesome.
2 Likes