Re: [feature request] More flexible repeats

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Sat Sep 24 2011, John Wiegley <jwiegley-AT-gmail.com> wrote:

>>>>>> Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:
>
>> I have habits that I need to perform, e.g., every weekday, or four times a
>> week.  I don't see a way to express that.  If I could schedule a task for
>> +1.4d or +1.75d (respectively), I'd be happy.
>
> Habits aren't really for scheduling, they're for monitoring a simple kind of
> consistency.  

Understood.

> So, if you *actually* need to do something four times a week, habits
> aren't the best way to express that need.

Exactly.  They don't have the expressiveness I want, as currently designed.

> If I had something that I wanted to do around four times a week, I'd use this:
>
>   .+1d/2d
>
> Which means, I could do it 7 times a week, or I should do it 3 times a week,
> but I'm likely going to fall somewhere in between.

I think I see.  That means, literally, "at most every day, but at least
every two days?"

So, a couple of questions:

- what would it change if I just wrote .+2d?
- how would I express something that I want to do 5 times a week?

> Habits were never meant as a precise way to keep you on a schedule.  

I'm not thinking of them that way.  I admit that "every weekday" is
pretty precise, but that's merely at the extreme end of a spectrum of
consistency.  It's still a goal with respect to which I'd reasonably
like to be able to monitor my success rate.

> The closest way I can think of to do that within Org's current
> framework is to schedule four different instances of your task, each
> with its own 1 week repeating interval.  That way, you'd see the item
> appearing in your agenda four times.  However, if you start slipping,
> things get very messy, very fast.

Yes.  Regular repeating events and habits both have this problem of no
easy way to express interesting repetitions.  Even my phone lets me
schedule something that happens on weekdays or on two particular days
each week.

I think the basic parts of such a language might be:

- predicates, e.g. Mon,Wed,Fri; the first week of each month; the first
  tuesday of the month
- periods, e.g. 1 month
- repetitions, e.g. 5 times

General predicates are all you need to express repeating events.  I
think you need periods and repetitions for habits.

> Lastly, even if you did have a 1.4d repeating interval for a habit, Habits
> would only show you if you'd been consistent at doing the task every 1.4 days.
> It would never be able to tell you if you'd been consistent at doing it 4
> times within any given week.

Then 1.4d is clearly *not* the expressive tool I need :-)

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com