It’s finally here – recurring tasks in Planner!

The feature we’ve all been waiting for is finally here! Microsoft recently released a new feature for Planner tasks to allow us to create recurring tasks straight out of the box.

Microsoft Planner is a lightweight task management tool to help you organise your to-do list, assign tasks and set deadlines. If you haven’t used it yet, you can read more about it here.  

Until now, Planner only allowed us to create one-off tasks out of the box. If there was a requirement for a recurring task, it could only be achieved by setting up rather complex automations in Power Automate. This made it fiddly for the average Planner user without the help of a Power Automate guru.

Now however, we can create recurring tasks easily. Here’s how:

1.  Create a task as you normally would in Microsoft Planner

2. Once the task is created, click on it to edit it. You will see a new field called “Repeat”. Click on Repeat and choose the details / frequency of how you would like your task to repeat.
By default, the task is set to “Does not repeat”.

In the Board View of Planner, your task will now display a recurring symbol with the next upcoming instance of your task.

In the Schedule View of Planner (the calendar view) you will be able to see all task instances.

If you click on a recurring task and mark it completed, it will only complete the next upcoming instance. In the example below, I have a recurring task for every Monday and the next instance was 16 January 2023. I have marked it as complete; the task remains on the board, but the due date has now changed to Monday 23 January 2023.

As you can see, marking a recurring task as “Complete” simply completes the next instance of the task. If you need to stop the recurring task completely, you can either edit the task and change the recurrence to “Does not repeat”, or you can click the ellipses on the task and delete the task entirely.