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Back before I had an electronic calendar, I used to rewrite everyone’s birthdays on my new calendar each year!  Can you imagine?? Or maybe you’re still doing that now and you don’t have to imagine…

Do you have a hard time remembering when to turn in your time sheet, get a tune up, plant garden seeds, family birthdays or when to take your pet to the vet for shots?  There’s an easy way to manage recurring events and tasks in Outlook.  You can set them up with just a few clicks.  Once the recurring event or task is set up, you’re done and you can free up that memory space in your brain for more important information.

If the recurring event is something that happens on a specific date and time, then a calendar appointment is what you need.  If the item is a task or project that isn’t date and time specific, use the task feature.  It allows you to set up a start date and an end date.  Unlike a calendar appointment, a task will stay on your list and is visible even if you don’t get it done on time.  (This is the downfall of using a calendar appointment for multiple step or multiple day tasks.  Once the date passes, it slips away and is easily forgotten about.)

Outlook allows you to set up appointments and tasks as daily, weekly, monthly and annually.  That’s quite a bit of flexibility so I think you can likely find exactly what you need.  For Google users, this feature is there for calendar appointments as well but it doesn’t have quite as much customization allowed.  The task function in Google is not nearly as robust and doesn’t have a recurrence option.

Set up a calendar event or task as usual and click on the “recurrence” button.  This brings up another box where you can set how frequently the event or task recurs. For birthdays, you would click “yearly”.  If you sign up for a class that is weekly, click “weekly” and select the day(s) of the week it will occur.  I use recurring tasks for my monthly newsletter and paying my credit card bills.

Here’s a video link that shows you how to set this up in under 2 minutes!

How to Set Up a Recurring Appointment in Outlook

How to Set Up a Recurring Appointment in Google

Are you using recurring appointments and tasks yet?  Do you use task lists in Outlook or Google?  Now that you’re armed with new information, will you start?