[From Wrike] How do you manage reminders and recurrence today? What works & what doesn't?

Hey admins!
Alina from Product team here 👋 Today I wanted to ask about your experience with managing reminders within your processes:

What do you use?

🔄 Do you use recurrent work items?
🤖 Do you use automation to comment and mention when something needs attention?
🔔 Do you wish you could setup a one-time reminder on one specific task or a project?

Why do you use it?

What do you want to remind about and why?
With these functionalities, what works well for you in Wrike today and what doesn't?

Find more posts tagged with

account-governance

recurring-tasks

automation

email-notifications

Comments

Devree Czupinski

Hello!

Answer to all 3: YES!

We have recurrent tasks set up for all of our recurring reports so we know when we need to run them, when they are due, and basic steps needed.
We use automation rules on our development requests to let the assignee know that something is due within 3 days and then again within 1 day. These work pretty well!
One time reminders would be great, especially when - or the ability to snooze something until later in your inbox!
I would love the ability to be able to remind people to fill in a couple of fields after the report is marked complete and about a day has passed (e.g. Hi, reminder to fill in ___ field!). If we do it upon marking complete, it can get tedious if they were going to fill it out as their next step.

Craig Lansley

Internally, we often recurrent tasks, automations for comments/mentions for reminders, and also snoozing inbox notifications sometimes however I have as an admin in our account been asked if there was a way to set a reminder for one specific task/project multiple times so I think this would be a great feature to have.

We are a conference organizing company who often promotes our clients events at other related conferences so sometimes people in our team have a task for these related events and they wanted a quick reminder a few weeks before, similar to how you can set up a meeting/appointment in Outlook calendar and set a reminder for 2 weeks before. I think it would also be useful to have if a task was put on hold/deferred and if changing the start/end date is not ideal/possible you could still set a reminder to follow up/check on status updates. Having this one off reminder feature may also be more accessible to people who aren't account/space admins to be able to set automations. I think it could also be faster to set up a one time reminder for a task or project rather than having to fiddle with a recurrent task when you may not actually want a different task/project created or if you have many different projects like we do, having to set different reminders for each project via automation can be onerous on admins.

Sven Passinger

We do not use recurrent tasks.

Really important are @-mentions as this is the only possibility to be sure somebody reads your comment. We use the @-mention also in automation. Most important are reminders for overdue tasks. We have three automations. One when the taks becomes overdue, one three days after and one 8 days after. That works really well.

A one time reminder would be very helpful. I often miss it. Very simple example: you are doing work on a task and then you are asking somebod for input you need to continue. So you @-mention him and then you put the task away. There is no possibility to get a reminder afetr 2 days (or whatever time) to aks again for the input or escalate it. That is one of the main drwabacks of Wrike if you compare it to mail communication. When I write an e-mail in Outlook I set a reminder in two days. So yes a functionality like follow up functionalty in Outlook with different times I can set for myself and the option to remind myself or another person would be great. It would be something like a simple automation rule just for a task.

Alexandra Torres

Hi Alina 👋 great questions.

In our enterprise, we do use recurrences heavily for operational work, and we also rely on automation to help surface items that need attention (e.g., commenting and @mentioning on overdue tasks or tasks with no visible action after several business days ). Those automations work well for nudging when something is truly stuck or at risk.

Where we struggle is with timing and actionability of reminders, especially around recurring work. Because notifications are tied to when a recurring task instance is created (vs. when the work is actionable), users can receive reminders well in advance of when they can actually start. That creates confusion and contributes to perceived overload, even though the system is behaving as designed.

What works well today:

Automations for overdue or stalled work
Recurrences for consistency and planning

What doesn’t work as well:

Lack of flexibility in when users are notified about recurring work
No way to align notifications to “this is actionable now” vs. “this exists for planning”

From a user perspective, having more control over reminder timing, especially at the individual level, would go a long way in making reminders feel helpful rather than noisy. Here is a post that goes into a bit more detail,

https://community.wrike.com/discussion/2723/recurring-tasks-add-user-level-control-for-notification-timing-actionable-vs-up-front

Alina Kucherenko

Appreciate your comments everybody! Let me know if anything else comes to mind!

Florian Gascho

Greetings.

I'd also say yes to all of the above.

→ We use recurrent work items to remind our colleagues monthly to book their hours. (This is still not available within timesheets)

→ We use Automation to the following:

→ Comment and inform colleagues during automated workflows
→ Comment and remind colleagues to keep tasks active & on track(not overdue)
→ Assign and inform colleagues when Tasks are active but not assigned.

I would love to have one time reminders for any worktitem to be reminded via E-Mail & Wrike inbox.

Sébastien Bouillon

Hi,

We are a service company specializing in industrial maintenance. Our operators must record their working hours using an MS Excel file that must be strictly adhered to. Currently, we use recurring tasks as reminders and to carry out these mandatory weekly tasks.

We are required to enter our hours into this Excel file, ideally on Fridays, but no later than the following Monday. However, the recurring tasks feature in Wrike currently does not allow the replication of custom fields with each iteration, nor does it allow attaching a file within the task to be automatically associated with every iteration.

Since these functionalities are not available, staff members currently add the document manually, whether it is the Excel file or an image. At present, we cannot use timesheets because they are too generic.