Why Should I Use Recurring Tasks in Project Management Software?

Using Recurring Tasks in Project Management Software

Each project you take on as a team will be made up of dozens of tasks. There are those that reside on the critical path, which have a direct impact on your overall timeline and key dependencies, and there are those tasks you’ll have to repeat to make consistent progress.

Project management recurring tasks are the latter: action items that you’ll tick off every day, week, or month. These tasks ensure that you stay on track to meet key deadlines and help you chip away at your critical path tasks, too.

To set up a recurring task pre-digital era, you would mark it on your calendar. For example, every Monday morning you’d write ‘review team meeting notes’. These days, you could either add this task to your shared digital calendar or project management software, which would, in turn, sync up with your team’s calendar.

To set up an effective recurring task, be sure to include as much information as necessary — especially if it involves several team members. 

If one of your team’s recurring tasks is reviewing team meeting notes, the information might include:

• Where to find the meeting notes/a link to the notes
• Who writes up the notes
• Who to email if there are any questions

The other consideration with recurring tasks is how long they’ll be relevant for. If you have Monday morning team meetings scheduled for the next month to deal with a particular project, you’ll only need the task to appear four times over the course of the month.

Advantages of recurring tasks in project management software

Enterprise project management software with recurring task functionality allows you to quickly create duplicates of a task without manually creating each one.

Let’s say you have a year-long project with weekly and monthly recurring tasks and deliverables such as:

• Weekly team meetings
• Weekly status reports
• Monthly executive meetings
• Monthly customer meetings
• Monthly project reports

When your project management software includes recurring task functionality, all you have to do is set up each of these tasks or deliverables once and then make it recurring. Without this ability, you’d have to set up each occurrence separately. That’s 52 individual team meetings, 52 weekly reports, and so on.

As you can see, the level of manual input grows exponentially. The more manual data that needs to be input, the greater the chance of user error — and the more time you and your team have to waste doing administrative tasks instead of working on the project.

What if, after the first few weeks, you discover your weekly team meetings are scheduled at the same time as those of another project, and a couple of your key players are on both teams? Rather than having your team members torn between the two, you may choose to move your meetings to another time.

If you’ve set up the meetings as a recurring task, this is one simple change. However, if you have 50 or more individual meetings in your calendar, that’s 50+ manual changes.

It’s easy to see the advantage of being able to bulk create, edit, and delete when you have a series of repetitive tasks on your project.

Any task that will happen multiple times throughout your project’s life cycle can benefit from being set as a recurring task. Some examples include:

• Weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly meetings
• Weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly reports
• Regularly scheduled audits or testing activities
• Recurring project or phase reviews

A unique use case for recurring tasks

While most businesses use recurring tasks to create and manage a chain of repetitive tasks, this is not the only use for them. Ricardo da Palma Borges & Associados (RPBA) is a Portugal-based law firm that chose to implement recurring tasks in a unique way.

RPBA deals with two types of deadlines: deadlines imposed by clients on consulting or planning projects, and deadlines set by courts and other public entities on litigation.

Client deadlines may change over the course of a project, but court and public entity deadlines are strictly non-negotiable milestones. Not only that, but the company found that it was difficult to keep many of their initial schedules due to the continued development of more pressing matters.

The company needed something that embraced the flexibility of an Agile methodology while still allowing them to plan for and meet the strict court timelines. RPBA found its solution by implementing recurring tasks. 

Any time there are legal proceedings, RPBA creates a recurring task with two occurrences. The first occurrence becomes a strict, immovable milestone that indicates their court deadline, such as a hearing or deadline for filing documents. The second occurrence is used as the working task with a due date. This task provides the firm with a means of managing and adjusting the project schedule internally to achieve interim goals, without losing sight of the fixed milestones that each task is tied to.

With this approach, the team can seamlessly collaborate on the case in the first task occurrence and reschedule it according to their current priorities, while the milestone always remains at the same place. This ensures that the timeline always reflects an up-to-date schedule with both interim and strict deadlines, allowing team members to quickly evaluate whether or not they’re on track.

Recurring task functionality

Not all project management software will include the same recurring task functionality. To get the most out of the feature, ensure your project management software allows you to not only set up recurring tasks but also do the following:

• Set the frequency of the task: When setting up the recurrence frequency of a task, it’s important that you can control how often the task shows up in your schedule. At a minimum, you should be able to choose whether the recurrence is daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Some project management software may also enable you to select other frequencies, such as quarterly and annually.
• Set the duration for your recurrence: In some cases, you will want a task to be recurring for a period that is shorter than the life of your project. Therefore, your project management software should allow you to specify either when you want the end date to be or how many times you want the task to reoccur. For instance, you may want the task to show up every week for 10 weeks, or you may want it to show up weekly until December 31, 2023. You should be able to select either option within your project management software.
• Change individual tasks without breaking the series: What happens if you need to change your Monday team meeting for next week because next Monday is a holiday? It’s important that your software allows you to change that one meeting to Tuesday without moving every single meeting in the series to Tuesday. At the same time, you don’t want that one change to force a break in the entire series, because a break would split them all back into individual tasks. This means if you later wanted to mass change the time on every meeting, you’d have to do it individually for each occurrence.    
• Change task names and descriptions: Look for project management software that enables you to change each task’s names and descriptions without breaking the chain. For instance, instead of having every monthly meeting called “Monthly Project Update,” you may wish to have them called “May Project Update,” “June Project Update,” and so on. This functionality will allow you to keep the recurring tasks linked for edits but makes it easier for you to visually tell them apart in your Gantt chart and reports.

How can Wrike help you with your recurring tasks?

Wrike lets you streamline your team’s workflows by setting up tasks that can anchor your productivity week after week. To save time and remind team members of regular responsibilities that drive projects forward, you can use Wrike to create automated recurring tasks.

How?

To make a task recurrent with Wrike, here are the steps you’ll need to take:

1. Open up the task.
2. Click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner.
3. Select the ‘Make recurrent’ option.
4. Now, choose the regularity of the task from the following: daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. Alternatively, set up a custom cadence that works for your team.
5. Specify how many tasks you wish to create and the end date.

Once you’ve gone through these steps, Wrike will take care of the rest and automatically populate your calendar with the recurring task(s) you created.

From here, you can edit the initial recurring task and, if necessary, apply the changes to all subsequent tasks, too. That way, changing circumstances don’t have to throw your task planning off course.

Plus, with Wrike’s team calendars, any recurring tasks you create will instantly become visible in every team member’s calendar view. That way, everyone can stay on the same page, see real-time updates to their tasks, and hit deadlines consistently.

Curious about how recurring tasks can streamline workflows and help your team hit your deadlines? Sign up for a free two-week trial today with Wrike and see for yourself how easy it is to manage your team’s productivity.