Simple Recurring Todo Items In Ruby

I use my simple Emacs Todo mode to keep track of my todo items but one thing that I’ve been missing has been recurring tasks. A calendar with recurring events works okay but I still have to remember to copy them into my todo list or I forget about them.

So tonight I whipped up a simple Ruby script that adds daily, weekly, or monthly todo items to my list. The best parts about it is that is that it is simple to add or remove a recurring item (just edit the yaml file) and I have the full power of ERB if I need it.

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#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# /home/edavis/bin/recurring_todo.rb
require 'yaml'
require 'erb'
require 'rubygems'
require 'trollop'
require 'active_support'
 
opts = Trollop::options do
  opt :daily, "run daily todos", :default => false
  opt :weekly, "run weekly todos", :default => false
  opt :monthly, "run monthly todos", :default => false
end
 
@todos = YAML.load(ERB.new(File.read("/home/edavis/doc/T/Todo/recurring.yml")).result)
 
def save_todos_to_file(schedule)
  File.open("/home/edavis/doc/T/Todo/Todo.todo", "a") do |file|
    @todos[schedule].each do |todo|
      file.puts todo
    end unless @todos[schedule].nil?
  end
end
 
save_todos_to_file(:daily) if opts[:daily]
save_todos_to_file(:weekly) if opts[:weekly]
save_todos_to_file(:monthly) if opts[:monthly]
 
# /home/edavis/doc/T/Todo/recurring.yml
<%
monday = Date.today.beginning_of_week 
tuesday = monday + 1
wednesday = monday + 2
thursday = monday + 3
friday = monday + 4
saturday = monday + 5
sunday = monday + 6
%>
--- 
:daily: 
:weekly: 
- "2 Weekly review #<%= saturday.strftime %> #gtd"
<% [monday, wednesday, friday].each do |day| %>
- "2 Water houseplants #<%= day.strftime %> #garden"
<% end %>
- "2 Redmine tip #<%= wednesday.strftime %> #marketing"
- "2 Weight metrics #<%= saturday.strftime %> #health"
- "2 Balance finances #<%= saturday.strftime %> #finance"
- "2 Pay bills #<%= saturday.strftime %> #finance"
- "2 Grocery shopping #<%= saturday.strftime %>"
- "2 Check garden #<%= saturday.strftime %>"
:monthly:
- "2 Monthly review for <%= Date::MONTHNAMES[Date.today.month] %> #gtd"
- "2 Business goal review #business"
# crontab
@monthly /home/edavis/bin/recurring_todo.rb -m
@daily /home/edavis/bin/recurring_todo.rb -d
@weekly /home/edavis/bin/recurring_todo.rb -w

Example Output

$ /home/edavis/bin/recurring_todo.rb -m -w -d

example output

(I use hashtags for due dates, GTD contexts, GTD projects, and general categorization)

Feel free to use or adapt it for yourself. I don’t think it’s worth it to put it on Github.

2 comments

    • edavis10 says:

      I used to use orgmode with planner.el (http://theadmin.org/articles/2006/07/26/emacs-planner-el-and-gtd/) but I didn’t like the format of it for my todos. Since I work on multiple computers, sometimes the counter would get mess up if I added todo items in two places. Now my format is much simpler and easy to merge in git. “X TODO” where X is the priority and causes the font-lock:

      1 – today
      2 – this week
      3 – this month
      4 – later
      A – Annual goal
      D – Dream
      L – Lifetime goal

      I do use orgmode for my notes files though. Great for that, just not as good for todo items (at least for me).

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