org-habit for multiple arbitrary days in a week

org-habit for multiple arbitrary days in a week

[James Harkins]

I have a task that I want to track using org-habit. I've spent about an hour looking through the manual and other sites, but so far the problem remains intractable.

With org-habit, it's easy to track something that should be done on one particular day of the week: .+1w.

It appears not to be easy to track something that should be done on two arbitrary days of the week.

It's easy to schedule something for two specific days of the week using a sexp. But, org-habit (for sensible reasons) doesn't support sexps.

I can also add multiple SCHEDULED lines. But org-habit doesn't work well with this either.

** TODO Update lesson gradesheet					       :Comp:
   SCHEDULED: <2014-10-13 Mon +1w>
   SCHEDULED: <2014-10-17 Fri +1w>
   :PROPERTIES:
   :STYLE:    habit
   :LOGGING:  TODO MAYBE INPROG MTG | DONE(!) POSTPONED
   :END:

Now, if I mark this item DONE, org-habit moves *both* scheduled dates forward to next week, even though 10-17 is still in the future and it's neither needed nor desirable to advance it. That is, scheduled dates that are today or in the past should move up, while scheduled dates in the future should be left alone. I guess the issue with that would be that you couldn't set a task DONE earlier than scheduled. That's not an issue for this specific task, but maybe for others.

I suppose the worst case is that I could create two "Update lesson gradesheet" entries, but that seems highly inelegant...?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

hjh

Re: org-habit for multiple arbitrary days in a week

[Nicolas Goaziou]

Hello,

James Harkins <jamshark70@qq.com> writes:

> I can also add multiple SCHEDULED lines. But org-habit doesn't work well with this either.
>
> ** TODO Update lesson gradesheet					       :Comp:
>    SCHEDULED: <2014-10-13 Mon +1w>
>    SCHEDULED: <2014-10-17 Fri +1w>

You can't. This is invalid Org syntax (only one scheduled keyword per
entry).


Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou

Re: org-habit for multiple arbitrary days in a week

[James Harkins]

At Mon, 13 Oct 2014 17:56:04 +0200,
Nicolas Goaziou wrote:
> > ** TODO Update lesson gradesheet					       :Comp:
> >    SCHEDULED: <2014-10-13 Mon +1w>
> >    SCHEDULED: <2014-10-17 Fri +1w>
> 
> You can't. This is invalid Org syntax (only one scheduled keyword per
> entry).

I see... perhaps it should be filed under "wish list" to support an "arbitrary days of week" repeater style. One way might be something like "<2014-10-13 Mon +4d +3d>": First advance by 4 days, then by 3 days, then 4 again and so on.

I would call it a low priority enhancement. There might actually be some benefit to tracking consistency on the two days separately. But the fact remains, if someone needed to treat it as one task that happens on two or three arbitrary days during the week (always the same days) and it wouldn't be useful for her to split them, org-habit currently does not support this as far as I can see.

hjh