Recurring Tasks Software

Backgrounds for using recurring tasks software:

Tasks management has some things that can be hardly represented using traditional paper means (notebooks, calendars, etc). One of such indigestible things is managing recurring tasks (also called iterative or repeating). They are some activities that re-occur every period of time (let’s say everyday, every week, etc), but there can be some more complicated variants such as jobs recurring twice a week, or recurring every two weeks.

Difficulty here (when using paper means) is that you have to duplicate records of recurring tasks many times (let’s say to rerecord the same item on every new week’s page during the entire year or several months if you use a weekly notebook). The time management best practices recommend us to use special templates, such as, for example, a single unified weekly table (a sectioned paper sheet) that represents seven days of any week of the year, so the tasks recorded into such a table are supposed to re-occur every week during known period, and such a template can be used in combination with other time management means.

Why to use recurring tasks software?

Since the computer-based software technologies appear, all these traditional planners are getting more and more old-fashioned, as they get replaced by that software that provides much more efficiency for setting up and reminding of the items. With a help of such software you don’t have to rewrite some items many times, or to maintain some additional paper sheets – you need just to start this software and use its functionality to set up task recurrence, and then keep up tracking reminders (pop-up messages). 

Good example is VIP Task Manager that is alternative to the following solutions:

• MS Outlook (this solution appears more expensive when you want to use it for the team);
• MS Project (this solution is quite expensive and complicated for small and medium businesses, without even mentioning needs of private individuals who want to manage their personal tasks);
• MS Access (this solution needs advanced and complicated customization as it is a database management suite, not a task management solution);
• MS Excel (this spreadsheet manager requires a serious customization to implement automatic task reminders as there are no task management capabilities by default);

VIP Task Manager is not an open source solution but a ready-to-go program which is continually improved by its developers (according to suggestions of its users). Using this tool is a more advantageous solution (than using repetitive activities in Microsoft Outlook) when you want to establish collaboration in a team, as it has an inbuilt collaborative module (unlike MS Outlook).