MakeTimeFlow Help

Repeating Tasks

15 min read

Repeating tasks appear in your task list every day, on the days of the week you choose, on a day of the month, or on a date each year. They give the week a shape that doesn’t depend on remembering: the check-ins, the standing sessions, and the small chores that keep everything else running.

Where They Live

Choose Repeating in the sidebar, then Customize Repeating Tasks. Your repeating tasks are one text document. A heading names a rhythm; the lines under it, each starting with - , are the tasks that arrive on that rhythm. Leave a blank line between groups.

Daily
- Begin Well 15m
- Shut Down 10m

Weekdays
- Clear inbox 10m

Mon, Wed, Fri
- Deep work block 90m start at 8am

1st of the month
- Pay invoices 30m @next

March 14
- Renew domain 15m @next

The Insert a heading buttons above the editor add a heading and an empty task line, so you never have to remember the spelling. A line starting with # is a note to yourself and is ignored.

Press Save and the page shows what we understood: each rhythm in plain words with its next date, and the tasks under it. Anything it could not read is listed by line number and stays in your text untouched, so you can fix it. Press Edit to go back.

Rhythms

WriteArrives
Daily, Every dayevery day, weekends included
Weekdays, Mon-FriMonday to Friday
WeekendsSaturday and Sunday
Monday, Tuesdays, Mon, Wed, Fri, Tuesday and Thursdaythose days each week
1st of the month, 15th of the monththat day each month; a 31st skips shorter months
Last day of the monththe last day, whatever the month’s length
March 14, Mar 14, 3/14that date each year

Daily means all seven days. If a line belongs to the working week, head it Weekdays. The older spellings with a colon, daily: and monday:, still work. A monthly or yearly task usually wants @next on the line rather than landing in Today.

Tasks arrive the morning of the day they fall on, whether you press Assign in BeginWell or have them assigned automatically. Lines with a start at time can arrive much earlier than that — a week or a month before their day — so the time is held on your calendar long before you get to it. That’s Protect the Week Ahead, below.

Why not just the calendar?

For anything with another person in it, the calendar is the right home, and its repeat rules are richer than these. But a calendar event is a time: it can’t be finished, it has no steps, it opens nothing, and it keeps no record of whether the thing happened. Give a repeating line a start at and it becomes a block on your calendar as well, synced out so nobody books over it, placed there weeks before the day arrives — and it stays a task. The calendar remembers the time. It doesn’t remember whether you did it.

Write Them Like Any Other Task

Each line uses the same Task Text Format as a task typed anywhere else in MakeTimeFlow: a duration, a priority, a bucket, a start time, and so on. A few lines from one person’s document:

Weekdays
- Check email 15m p2
- Morning standup type:meeting 15m start at 9am

Monday
- Plan the week 30m p1
- Review metrics 20m

Friday
- Weekly reflection 45m p1
- Clean up inbox 15m

A line without a bucket lands in @today. A line with start at and a time of day is scheduled for that hour.

Three parts of the format do more work here than anywhere else.

Time on a project or a tag

Two words turn a line into a sitting: time set aside for a body of work rather than one item.

- work on "MakeTimeFlow platform" 2h start at 9am
- work on #email 30m start at 4pm

With a #, it means everything carrying that tag. Without one, it’s the name of a project you already have. Start the timer and you land in flow with just that work in front of you (see Tag Buckets).

This is the one worth pointing out

Nearly everything else you put on repeat is a single task. work on puts a budget on repeat: a decision, made once, about how much of each day a project or a pile gets. Repeated every morning, that decision is most of what consistency is.

Subtasks make checklists

Indent a line under another (two spaces, then the dash) and it arrives as a subtask of the line above. That turns a repeating task into a ready-made checklist: the steps come with it every time, and you never rebuild them from memory.

- check servers and apply updates 20m
  - review the error monitor
  - apply pending updates
  - confirm backups ran

A URL launches when you start

Put a URL in the line and it opens the moment you start a timer on that task. Only that task’s own URL opens; a URL on one of its subtasks opens when you start the subtask.

If you’d rather not see the address in the title, tuck it into the task’s notes with the parentheses form. It still opens on start, and the title stays clean:

- review analytics 5m (notes: https://plausible.io)

How detection works, what it opens, and how to switch it to ask first are on Task Actions.

Assign Them Automatically Each Morning

Until now, repeating tasks waited for you. Each morning a step in your BeginWell ritual showed today’s lines, and you pressed Assign. Now you can let them arrive on their own.

Tick Assign my repeating tasks automatically each morning, and around 4 AM in your time zone, the lines for that day are added to your list, before you’ve opened the app. When you start BeginWell, the Add repeating tasks step is already checked, with a note of how many were added. There’s nothing to press.

The checkbox is on the Repeating page (in the sidebar) and again on Customize Repeating Tasks, where your document lives. Turn it on partway through the day and today’s tasks are added right away, so you can see what it does before tomorrow morning does it for you.

Once it’s on, the Repeating page changes job. Instead of a text box and an Assign button, it shows what was added today, so you can review the list, start a timer on something, or trim what today doesn’t need.

What it takes care of

  • Once a day, and only once. If you delete a task, it stays gone until tomorrow.
  • No pile-ups. A line without a time whose earlier copy is still open in your list isn’t added again, so an unfinished review analytics from Tuesday doesn’t stack up under Wednesday’s. A block with a start at time that you never touched is cancelled once its day has passed, so it never stacks under the next one either; the cancelled block is the record that the day went by without it.
  • Holiday Mode is respected. While it’s on, nothing is added.
  • It pauses when you do. If you haven’t done anything in MakeTimeFlow for two weeks, it stops filling a list you aren’t looking at. Any ritual, timer, or task edit brings it back the next morning.

Why this took us so long

Manual assignment was a choice, not an oversight. Early on we noticed that the small act of committing each morning made people more likely to do their repeating tasks, so we kept the step. But it has a failure mode: skip the step and the tasks never appear at all, which defeats the point of a repeating task. So this is an experiment. Automatic assignment is opt-in, and we’re watching whether tasks that arrive on their own get done as reliably as tasks you chose. If they do, the morning step has earned its retirement. Either way, both modes stay: the step for those who want the moment of choosing, the checkbox for those who would rather it were simply done.

Protect the Week Ahead

Assigning each morning solves remembering. It doesn’t solve the harder problem: by the time this morning arrives, the good hours are already spoken for. Somebody booked your Tuesday 9 AM last Thursday, and no amount of arriving on time will get it back.

So the document can reach forward. The same lines that arrive each morning can be placed on your calendar a week or a month before their day, held there, and synced out, so the meeting that would have taken the hour lands somewhere else instead.

That’s the second half of a pair the product has always meant to offer. Design your time is writing the document: your ideal week, made once in a few lines — the mornings that belong to the real work, the one slot email gets, the reading hour before the writing hour, the walk at noon, the call on Sunday. Protect your time is projecting it forward, so the week you designed is already on the calendar when everyone else starts filling it.

Choosing how far ahead

Once Assign my repeating tasks automatically each morning is ticked, a second choice appears beneath it:

Scheduled tasks are assigned: on the day · a week ahead · a month ahead

ChooseWhat happens
on the dayEvery line arrives the morning of its day. The default, and how repeating tasks have always worked.
a week aheadEvery line with a start at time is assigned for the next 7 days and synced to your calendar.
a month aheadThe same, for the next 30 days.

Seven and thirty days rolling, not this calendar week or this calendar month. Choose a week on a Thursday and you’re protected through next Thursday; the horizon moves with you.

Manual assignment never places ahead. The Assign button is always about today.

Only timed lines are protected

A line with a start at time is you saying I want this hour. Those become blocks, and blocks can be held in advance.

A line without a time is work you intend to do that day, which needs no defending, so it keeps arriving the morning of. That asymmetry is worth designing around: put a time on what you want protected, and leave the rest untimed.

Weekdays
- deep work 2h start at 8am      ← held on the calendar, weeks out
- clear inbox 15m                ← arrives Tuesday morning, like always

Where the blocks land

A block for a day three weeks out doesn’t go in Today — it goes where its date puts it. Today if it falls today, @next if it lands inside your next-days window, @later beyond that.

So turning on a month ahead will fill @later with the shape of your month. That’s the feature working, not a fault, but it’s worth seeing coming: three timed lines across a month of weekdays is around sixty blocks. If your @later list is somewhere you go to think, consider starting with a week.

They also don’t all appear at once. MakeTimeFlow places up to fifty blocks at a time and tops up every hour, so a freshly chosen month settles over an afternoon rather than arriving as a wall.

A block assigned ahead is yours

Drag it, resize it, finish it, or delete it, and it stays as you left it. The system fills in what’s missing and never re-adds what you removed — so a Thursday you deliberately cleared stays clear, and a block you moved to 10 AM stays at 10 AM.

Change the document and the new lines are assigned from tomorrow onward; days already placed keep what they have. When you want the new version everywhere, use the line beneath the setting: N blocks assigned ahead · Clear them.

Clearing is a fresh start, so it’s worth knowing exactly what it takes. It removes every future block still sitting open — including ones you dragged to a new time — and gives those days back, so the next hourly check fills them from what your document says now. Blocks you already finished, cancelled or deleted stay exactly as they are: those are decisions, and clearing doesn’t undo them. Today and everything behind it are never touched.

Start with a week

A week is enough to feel it and short enough to undo. Live with it for a fortnight, look at what actually held, then decide whether the month is worth the volume.

So the loop is: write the week you want, let it be placed ahead, move what the real week moves, and let the misses be cancelled and counted. Over a month the cancelled blocks tell you which part of your ideal week was never realistic — and the document is where you go to redraw it.

What to Put on Repeat

A repeating task is just its text, so anything the Task Text Format can say, a repeating line can say every day. That makes it more powerful than it looks. The uses with the most leverage:

A time budget for a project. work on "MakeTimeFlow platform" 2h start at 9am on every weekday is a project budget: two protected hours at a known time, before the day fills. You decide once how much of your week a project gets, instead of renegotiating it every morning against whatever is loudest. This is the natural companion to a Smart Bet, which needs steady hours to reach a verdict.

A standing session on a tag. work on #email 30m start at 4pm gives email one slot instead of the whole day. The same works for #calls, #admin, or #review. Cross-cutting work stops being a stream of interruptions and becomes an appointment.

The chores that keep things running. Server updates on Monday. Reconciling expenses on Friday. Backing up the laptop. Chasing everything you’re waiting for. None of these are urgent until the week they are, and a repeating line is the cheapest insurance there is.

Input before output. If you write, block time to read first. read this week's saved articles 1h start at 2pm on Friday, followed by write 1h, turns the links you collected all week into raw material instead of a guilty backlog. The same pattern holds for any craft: listen before you compose, look before you design.

The dimensions that never make the list on their own. The Flourishing Map has six dimensions, and a busy week tends to fill one of them, Achievement, and starve the rest. A daily walk 30m start at 12pm, a Sunday call someone I've been meaning to call 20m, or three good things 5m start at 5pm before Shutdown puts Physical Health, Relationships, and Positive Emotions on the same footing as the deadline. Repeating tasks are also the natural home for a Personal Experiment: add the line for two weeks, see what happens, then keep it or delete it.

Keep the list honest

A repeating task you keep deleting is telling you something. Either the line is wrong (wrong day, wrong time, too long) or it doesn’t belong on repeat. Fix it or drop it. The Task Trust System only works when what’s on the list is what you’ll actually do.

A Week on Autopilot

Putting it together, one person’s document looks like this:

# the walk is every day; the work is not
Daily
- walk 30m start at 12pm

Weekdays
- work on "MakeTimeFlow platform" 2h start at 9am
- work on #email 30m start at 4pm

Monday
- check servers and apply updates 20m (notes: https://cloud.digitalocean.com)
  - review the error monitor
  - apply pending updates
  - confirm backups ran
- chase anything I'm waiting for 10m

Friday
- read this week's saved articles 1h start at 2pm
- write 1h start at 3pm
- reconcile expenses 15m

Sunday
- call the family 30m

1st of the month
- send invoices 30m @next

Last day of the month
- close the books 45m @next

March 14
- renew the domain 15m @next

With automatic assignment on, each line is on the list by 4 AM on its day, subtasks and links included, and BeginWell opens with the step already ticked.

Set that document to a week ahead and five of its lines change character. The noon walk, the 9 AM project block, the 4 PM email slot, and Friday’s reading and writing hours stop being things that show up on the day and become time already held on the calendar for the next seven days — the shape of the week, visible before it starts. Everything else (the server check, chasing what you’re waiting for, the invoices) keeps arriving the morning of, which is exactly what those want.

See Also