Manual · Tasks

Setting up recurring tasks

Most family chores are routines, not one-offs. PiggyTask covers the usual rhythms with a single tap — and lets you build the exceptions freely.

The presets

When you create a task you pick the rhythm from a short list. It covers what actually comes up in most families:

The reference day comes from the day you create the task — create a weekly task on a Wednesday and it will come back on Wednesdays. If you want a different day, just say so ("every Monday") or change it through the recurrence chip.

Every 2 weeks adds a question you could not otherwise answer: which of the two weeks should the series run in? Under Next occurrence the two candidate dates appear as buttons — tap the one the series should start on. Without that choice every fortnightly task would necessarily start in the current week.

Custom rhythms

If the list is not enough, Custom… opens the Custom rhythm dialog, where you set:

• The interval — every N days, weeks or months. A stepper raises N; "back to ×1" resets it.
• The days of the week — on a weekly rhythm you pick exactly the days the task should appear on. Several days are fine.
• The monthly rule — on a monthly rhythm either by day (such as "on the 15th of every month", including "at the end of the month") or by weekday (such as "on the 2nd Saturday of the month"). The distinction matters: the 31st does not exist in every month, "end of the month" always does.
• The start date — optional, and available for every interval greater than one, not just weeks. "Every two months" would otherwise begin whenever; a start date decides when. If the chosen date does not fall on an appearance day of the series, PiggyTask automatically uses the next matching day.

That covers the things a fixed list would never contain: the bins every second Tuesday, the bathroom on the first Saturday of the month, the houseplants every three days.

Appearing and being due are two different things

This is where most questions come from — and the one thing worth genuinely understanding.

• The appearance day decides when the task shows up in the kid's dashboard.
• The due date decides when it gets flagged as overdue.

By default the two are identical: "on Wednesdays" means it appears on Wednesday and is due on Wednesday. With "due …" or "visible from …" you separate them. One example that often fits in practice:

Take out the bins on Wednesdays available from Tuesday

The task appears on Tuesday so the kid can do it the evening before, but is not due until Wednesday.

The Custom due-date option does the same thing in a dialog, for example "appears on the 1st, due on the last day of the month".

The one exception

For daily and weekday recurring tasks the due date is always the appearance day, and that cannot be changed. The reason is technical but sensible: a new instance is created every day here, and an unfinished one sits there unchanged until then. If the due date were later, a skipped task would never be noticed.

Creating a task mid-period

If you create a task on Thursday that runs on Mondays, the current week is strictly speaking already over. PiggyTask asks whether the current period should be skipped — rather than handing your kid an overdue task they never had a chance to do.

The same happens when the visibility of the current period has already passed: you see when the task would have been visible and when it becomes due, and you decide.

A period that has already been skipped is marked as such and not offered again.

Free-tier limits

Without Premium, 5 recurring mandatory tasks can be active at the same time. Recurring bonus tasks count towards the bonus pool, which allows 5 entries.

What happens when you go over, and what Premium changes, is covered in Premium and the free-tier limits.

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