Recurring events and task management

When you add an event to a calendar and customize its schedule to be repeating, you’ve created an RRule or recurrence rule. I know it’s called this because 99/100 scheduling apps use the iCal RRule format specified in IETF RFC 5545.

GPT tells me

GPT tells me the RRule format follows a specific syntax to define the recurrence pattern of events. It typically consists of several components, including:

1. FREQ (Frequency): This component specifies the frequency of the recurring event, such as daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.
2. INTERVAL: Specifies the interval at which the event repeats. For example, if set to 2, the event occurs every two weeks.
3. COUNT: Specifies the total number of occurrences of the recurring event.
4. UNTIL: Specifies the end date or time for the recurring event. It indicates when the recurrence pattern should stop.
5. BYDAY: Used to specify the days of the week for weekly recurring events. For example, “BYDAY=MO,WE,FR” means the event occurs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
6. BYMONTHDAY: Used to specify specific days of the month for monthly recurring events.
7. BYMONTH: Used to specify specific months for yearly recurring events.
8. BYSETPOS: Used in combination with other components to specify the nth occurrence within the recurrence pattern. For example, “BYDAY=2MO” means the second Monday of the month.

The RRule format

The RRule format allows for complex and flexible recurrence patterns. Often we don’t think about this for mundane tasks or we just add a reminder for it in our calendar and add the rule there because it’s easier to think about visually. Even then we’re not adding any intention to our routines. There’s no opportunities included for reflecting on them. It’s just the same basic skills we learned as kids, teens or possibly adults for things like personal finance routines.

For instance

For instance, laundry and clothing care. Unless you’re a fashion aficionado or an obsessive professional, you probably haven’t spent that much time thinking about your laundry routines. I know we all run across some TikTok videos about folding clothes or how to get a stain out. We don’t know what we don’t know but leaving this stuff to chance isn’t the best plan.

There are books and articles and videos about anything you can think of. Books are often organized but they’re hard to consume. Articles are hit or miss and require bookmarking or something. Videos, same as articles TBH plus it’s harder to scan them for quality. You can try ratings or comments for filtering out the worst content.

The challenge here is that we don’t want to spend a lot of time on routines. They’re not very exciting, typically, so the idea of leveling up our skill level at these mundane tasks never makes our priority list. If we do think about it, we run into a learning curve that might not be as shallow as we have time for.