Welcome to the 3 Rings Community!
In this thread, you can ask questions and discuss the inventory template. If you ask a question, you’ll hear from me! Download the template below.
The template:
The Video:
Hi Julian,
Thank you for the invitation to join the community.
As it happen, I am a fan of the Pomodoro system, and after watching the above video, I recreated it in conjunction with the AT calendar to keep a diary. (which needed a generated end time to maintain the half-hour slots - see screenshot).
Instead of generating daily slots, how do you create a week’s worth (or even two weeks?
Also, how to do keep the single select colours from the example tasks into the generated tasks (they are all blue…pls see screenshot)
I appreciate any help you can provide.
Thank you.
Darren
Hi @DarrenOD, welcome to the community! I actually have two videos on recurring tasks (the titles are almost identical), but they are set up very differently. The one at the top shows how to generate a new task that matches one that you just completed based on a recurring interval, such as submitting a report that’s due every Friday. The one you’re referring to, I think, is the other one, which uses a template table to auto-create a whole list of tasks on a regular schedule. I’m going to answer the questions assuming that is true.
I’ll answer your second question first, since it’s simpler:
Since the example tasks live in a separate table than the created “actual” tasks, each has it’s own single select field with it’s own color scheme. However, if you go into the “Tasks” table and edit the colors there to match the other table, they will stay matching going forward (so you just have to make this manual change once. Go to the “Type” field, right click and choose “Edit Field”, then click each color to change it.
Second question: Yes, you can absolutely create one week’s worth of records at a time. For this, I’d probably change the automation trigger to “At a scheduled time”, then use a “Find Records” action to find all of the example tasks. Then you can use the repeating group feature to create a “Tasks” record for every example task. This leaves you one last job, which is to dynamically generate the right date for each example task. Like for example, if you want to have “submit TPS report” generated every Tuesday and Friday, you need to calculate the next upcoming Tuesday and Friday with a formula. Without doing it all for you, here’s an example of one that I created for myself to calculate every Friday at 9am. It works by seeing what day of the week it is today, then adding the appropriate number of days it takes to get to Friday:
DATEADD(DATEADD(
DATETIME_PARSE(
DATETIME_FORMAT(TODAY(),'MM/DD/YYYY') & ' ' & '9:00am','MM/DD/YYYY h:mma'),
SWITCH(WEEKDAY(TODAY()),
0,5,
1,4,
2,3,
3,2,
4,1,
5,0,
6,6
),
'days'
),{Time Zone Offset},'hours')
And here’s the time zone offset that the formula uses (this is only necessary if you’re using exact times)
DATETIME_DIFF(
DATETIME_PARSE(DATETIME_FORMAT(TODAY(),'MM/DD/YYYY h:mma'),'MM/DD/YYYY h:mma'),
DATETIME_PARSE(DATETIME_FORMAT(SET_TIMEZONE(TODAY(),'America/New_York'),'MM/DD/YYYY h:mma'),'MM/DD/YYYY h:mma'),
'hours')
Thank you, Julian, for the speedy response and for taking the time.
Yes, this video is the other one the one that inspired me to create a Pomodoro system via Airtable.
I did the first question, the one regarding the single select colours, which helped my calendar/diary to pop out.
Unfortunately, I am stuck on the 2nd question as I am inexperienced with formulas & dates!
A) Swopped the trigger from matching condition to scheduled time.
B) Find records - example tasks.
C)This is where I am stuck! Which is to generate the correct date for each example task dynamically. I don’t know my next step/s from here.
Thanks again
Darren
Hi Darren,
There are a few different ways to do this. Rather than the one I posted above, which is always trying to find Friday regardless of the day of the week (needlessly complicated for this purpose), you can do this:
Add a number field called “Days Ahead”. This field is going to allow your generated time field to span across multiple days. To do this, wrap your existing generated time formula in a DATEADD() function. So it looks like this:
DATEADD(-existing formula-,{Days Ahead},'days')
Let’s say your automation is set to run every week on Sunday. For each day that you want to generate as a Monday, put the number 1 in the “Days Ahead” field. For Tuesday, enter the number 2, etc. Here’s an example base I created with that modification:
Thank you, Julian, for taking the time to reply and for your help.
As you have said, the alternative method is much easier to use, and thanks to you, I have got going with the Pomodoro system via Airtable.
Cheers
Darren
1 Like
Great news! Thanks for letting me know 
Hi everyone,
I also needed to create a month’s worth of recurring tasks (in my case appointments) due to my business working as such so I created one basic automation as an add-on to Justin’s Recurring Tasks base.
My use-case is: I book clients for recurring at-home appointments with a minimum contract duration of 1 month and wished to create all appointments for the following month.
Table configuration: I added a field called “End Date” where I input the last day of the contract. I also renamed the “Complete” field to “Create appointments for next month” for ease of use.
Automations: So, per Julian’s template base, there is already an automation that creates the next appointment after the current one is completed, right. So, adding onto that automation, I created another automation whereby when that first new record is created when you click “Create appointments for next month” (remember, this is the “Complete” field in Justin’s template), a loop is triggered with the very important condition which states that If Next Due Date is on or before End Date the loop will run and will create all future appointments within that month all the way to and including the End Date.
I am attaching a quick screen recording to present how the automation works, hope it’s helpful → https://streamable.com/20di3f
1 Like
This is very cool! Thanks for sharing.
And one more point more adding on to the automation I presented in my previous reply - once the month is over and the last appointment in that month is completed, you can run the off-the-shelf “delete records” script as an extension to delete all records except for the original one. Then (if the contract is rolling out for the next month), you can simply change the end date and run the automation again.
1 Like