Hidden Productivity Killer: Tasks We Only Do Infrequently

Staying on top of one-off tasks is dead simple: you add it to your to-do list, you do it, and you check it off. If you don’t get to it today, it’s still there tomorrow. Similarly, things you do every day or every Wednesday are no problem. Add it to your habit tracker, calendar, or reminders app. Even projects, while more complex, are relatively straight forward: do step one, then step two, all the way to step n.

But infrequently recurring tasks - things like replacing a filter every six months - are inherently fraught.

Sure, you could set up a repeating all-day calendar event and even add a reminder notification, but there’s a good chance it will get lost in the shuffle. Unlike something on your todo list, if you don’t see the event in today’s calendar, it’s not there anymore tomorrow.

Or you could use a repeating reminder with an assigned date and time. It’ll stay on your reminders list as overdue until you check it off. But let’s say you’re a few days - maybe even a week - late. The next recurrence will show up on the original schedule. There’s no way for the schedule to automatically slide forward based on when you actually did the task.

These solutions also don’t provide any kind of tracking of when you actually completed the task. Keeping a log of dates you did the task allows for all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Finally, even if you have a self-updating list of recurring tasks, you have to remember to actually check it, even though there won’t necessarily be something to do every day.

Essentially, a completely different system is needed for tracking these types of tasks.

Do you ever experience any of these?

The human brain thrives on the short-term. We react to what’s visible and urgent, and we remember what we do frequently. When something happens often – every day or every week – it naturally stays on our radar. But when something only happens every few months, we mentally file it under “Future Me will remember.”

Future Me rarely does.

There’s also an enormous gap in most of the tools we use. Task managers and project boards are designed for one-off or high-frequency, continuous work, not long-cycle maintenance or low-frequency follow-ups. Calendars work well for actual events, but don’t allow for flexible recurrence and are terrible for tracking completion. If you miss a recurring event, it’s gone until next time.

It’s easy enough to schedule the big important tasks that come on fixed dates once a quarter or once a year. Anything with a deadline, regulatory requirements, and concrete consequences for missing.

But what about the things you should be doing roughly every six weeks, or twice a year? The important, but not urgent work? Maybe staying on top of it will make that annual deadline easy instead of scrambling at the last minute. Maybe it will give you an edge over your competitors. Or give you some peace of mind that thing – highly unlikely to happen, but would be terrible if it did – is under control. Or maybe it’s a little deadline, one that’s not so time-sensitive or urgent, but there nonetheless.

It’s bad enough that we pay the price of missed deadlines and lost opportunities. The real toll of failing to stay on top of irregular tasks, however, is cognitive noise.

We’ve all experienced the nagging feeling of having forgotten something important. On its own, this feeling is annoying. But sometimes our brains treat this sensation like a physical threat, leading to stress.

Worse still, our brains seem to be wired to give precedence to uncompleted tasks, which can make it difficult to focus on what we’re doing now. This is called the Zeigarnik effect. Our minds are not well-suited to remembering long lists of uncompleted tasks. But that doesn’t mean they won’t try!

Building habits can help us stay on top of daily or maybe even weekly tasks. But when tasks occur less frequently, it’s harder to remember when to do it, and yet it occupies more mental space. Think of it like a background process on a computer, consuming resources.

The result is that, unless we have a trusted system in place – one where we can mentally offload things we need to remember, but not work on right now – we’ll be constantly stressed, distracted, and forgetting important things. You might not even notice this low-grade anxiety if you’ve simply accepted it as the way things are. But you can be sure it’s taking its toll, driving you towards burnout.

Most professionals cobble together a patchwork of tools:

Each of these systems handles a slice of the problem — but none handle time-delayed recurrence.

Calendars can remind you when something should happen, but they don’t adjust if you complete it late (or early). To-do lists are great for short cycles but quickly become cluttered if you add every long-term recurring task. Project tools are powerful but overkill for personal maintenance work.

It’s not that professionals are disorganized — it’s that most productivity tools are optimized for visible work, not invisible maintenance.

That’s why you might find yourself remembering the big quarterly report only when your manager asks for it, or realizing your expense policy hasn’t been updated in a year when a reimbursement goes wrong.

What a Smarter Recurring Task Tracker Looks Like

To manage irregular tasks effectively, we need tools — or systems — that think more like we do when we’re at our best. A recurring task tracker designed for real-world irregularity would include:

This kind of system doesn’t just remind you; it externalizes memory. It offloads the need to remember what needs to be remembered.

That’s the key shift: from trying to manage everything in your head to designing an environment that manages it for you.

Even without specialized software, you can build a lightweight recurrence workflow that dramatically reduces the stress of forgotten tasks. Here’s a simple process to start:

This framework works in a spreadsheet, a Notion table, or a dedicated recurring task tracker. The key is making sure nothing disappears just because it’s not due today.

Most productivity advice focuses on optimization — faster checklists, smarter prioritization, tighter workflows. But sometimes the biggest wins come from removing the need to remember altogether.

Irregular tasks are rarely urgent until they’re emergencies. By capturing them in a reliable system — one that reflects their true cadence — you clear mental space for the creative, strategic, and high-value work that actually moves things forward.

Forget less. Do better work. Sleep a little easier knowing that “once-in-a-while” doesn’t mean “out of sight, out of mind.”