Do you ever feel like you’re spending too much time reminding your team of upcoming due dates? This week, we’ll show you how to automate reminders and customize individual due dates, otherwise known as Recurring Reminders (reminders that persist until a task is marked complete).
Setting a Recurring Reminder is particularly helpful for projects with a number of important
deadlines, or if your team is spread across multiple projects or they need a little extra help to stay on track. With Recurring Reminders set in your sheet, you’ll save time and rest easier knowing that nothing will be missed.
So What Exactly is a Recurring Reminder?
A Recurring Reminder is one that will be sent to a recipient every day until the task is complete. While Smartsheet doesn't have pre-built functionality to make this happen, you can use formulas to get the results you need, similar to the way you create Conditional Reminders.
This workflow is best for sheets that you and your team are actively using each day. In order for these steps to work, your sheet with this formula and reminder combination needs to be opened and saved every day.
Steps to Take to Schedule a Recurring Reminder:
The idea here is to use a formula to automatically insert "today's" date into a date column. Every day that you open and save the sheet, "today's" date will update, triggering another Reminder.
1. Make sure you have a column in your sheet to mark if tasks are complete.
Depending on your team’s method for tracking task completion, you can use a few different methods to indicate when something is complete. The most common scenarios that we encounter are either a checkbox column or a percentage complete column.
2. Add a new column ‘Reminder Date’ to your sheet.
Use the ‘Reminder Date’ column to generate the dates that will send Reminders to your team, rather than using a ‘Start Date’ or ‘End Date’ column. When adding this column, make sure to set the column type to ‘Date’.
3. Create an IF formula.
The IF formula will be used to insert "today's" date into the cell only if the task hasn't been marked as complete.
The formula will vary based off your team’s method for tracking completion.
If your team is using a checkbox column to track task completion, your formula will look like this:
=IF(Complete4 = 0, TODAY(), “”)
This formula will check the value listed in row 4 of the ‘Complete’ column to see if it is equal to 0. In formulas, 0 represents an unchecked box and 1 represents a checked box.
If the box in row 4 is unchecked, meaning the task in row 4 still needs to be completed, then the formula will insert today’s date into the Reminder Date column.
If your team is using a percentage column to track task completion, your formula will look like this:
=IF([% Complete]4 <> 1, TODAY(), “”)
This formula will check your ‘% Complete’ column in row 4, to see if the value is “not equal to” (represented by <> in the formula) 1. 1 is the decimal equivalent to 100%. This means that if the task’s percentage complete is less than 100%, not complete, today’s date will be inserted into your ‘Reminder Date’ column.
In both of these scenarios, the formulas used will make "today's" date appear automatically in the Reminder Date column as long as the task remains incomplete. The next day that you open the sheet, the date listed in the column will update automatically based on the formula.
4. Set a new sheet-level Reminder
Now that you’ve used a formula to automatically update your sheet each day, schedule a reminder to check in with your team based off the ‘Reminder Date’ information, via a sheet-level Reminder.
Sheet-level Reminders are applied to every row in your sheet in a specific column that has a date, including rows you may add after the fact. To set a sheet-level Reminder, open up the Alerts tab at the bottom of your sheet – the Notifications and Reminders form will pop up.
Schedule your sheet-level Reminder to be sent out one day after the date in your new Reminder Date column.
One note about how Reminders work:
Reminders are sent out automatically, based on your local time setting, between midnight and 5 am – meaning you can’t send a Reminder on the same day you create it. This is why your Reminders are sent one day after the date in the Reminder Date column.
Thanks to formulas and a little help from Smartsheet, you can rest easy knowing that the details are covered.
Til next week, dig in and explore!
- Support Team