Much of my work is recurring items, so this is a major factor for me.
The most useful thing for me is a text file that I call “DailyTBDs.” This amounts to a checklist, though it has elements of calendar. It is divided into the seven days of the week, and I use it for the following:
At the top of each day’s list are the items that are to be done on that day, every week. Some of them are things that I want to be part of every day (e.g., exercise); they are on this part of the list for every day.
Next I write in the things that GTD would consider “calendar” items – fixed appointments, non-recurring tasks that must be done That Day or not at all, etc. Part of my weekly review is to synchronize this for the coming week with my “real” calendar, which for me is an old-fashioned paper “At-a-glance” pocket calendar, where such items reside when they are beyond the current week. During my workflow, I look at the DailyTBD multiple times a day, and my pocket calendar not so much, unless I am writing down new items or away from my computer.
For recurring things that are on a longer cycle than one week, I use my Task List (this is the “To Do” section of Lotus Organizer – old software, but it works for me).
Example:
“Income taxes: see checklist. Next move: (list it here). Move one year.”
The checklist (a text file) breaks it out into things such as downloading forms and instructions, gathering paperwork, etc. It gets a “Next move” because it is a Project.
I put a date range on it so that it becomes active on February 1 and overdue after April 15, and a “Project” tag on it so that it shows up on my project list. When I have finished it, I change the dates to the following year. It is in the Organizer “Future” category until the next February 1, so I don’t need to pay attention to it.
Right now, about sixty percent of the items in my Organizer “To Do” are Future. Not all of these are recurring, but many are. This sort of thing used to be an attention-draining swamp before I started GTD. I trusted too much in memory to get me going on things. The taxes, for example, would work that way, because they are awfully hard to overlook – though they
are dreadfully easy to postpone until they must be done in a last-minute rush. But there are other recurring projects and tasks that don’t shout at you so loudly, and are often very important to work and home life going well.
It is a huge benefit to have these things show up in the active portion of the Project list and "To Do" list at appropriate times.