Items

Overview

Each item is a (possibly repeating) task that you can complete.

To manage items, go to the Items tab. Other tabs also provide convenient ways to add new items or to modify existing items.

The Items tab shows all your items. By default, only active (incomplete) items are shown. You can click on the respective buttons on the top right to show all items or only completed items.

Click New Item to add an item, or click on an existing item to edit it. The basic attributes are:

• The name of the item.
• The cost of the item, which is the number of sessions (see Quota) needed to complete the item. If the cost field is left blank, it will be treated as 0, and VIR will no longer plan sessions for this item on the calendar; however, the item may still be seen and completed from the items tab.
• The parent of the item. See Child items for more details.
• The defer date and/or due date of the item. See Defer date and due date for more details.

In the items list, you can click on the checkbox to the left of each item to mark it as completed.

The items list also shows other useful information, such as the completed vs total cost of each item, and the estimated completion date according to VIR's heuristic.

Child items

Each item can belong to zero or one parent item. A top-level item is an item that doesn't have a parent.

In the Items tab, you can click on the "Add" icon to the right of each item to add a child item. You can also set the parent of a new item directly in the editor dialog.

The effects of parent-child relationships are:

• When you mark a parent item as completed, each child item is also marked as completed. Note that marking all child items as completed will not automatically mark the parent item as completed.
• If an item has child items, the parent item's cost will be entirely determined by the sum of the child items costs, and the user-entered cost value for the parent item is ignored.
• Whenever you fuzzy-search for child items, you can try to search for the "full-path". For example, if you have an item named "Laundry" under the parent item "Chore", you can use the query "chorelaundry" to fuzzy-search for the child item. This helps with disambiguation as well.
• See Defer date and due date for more details about how defer/due dates work with child items.
• See Item repetition for more details about how repetition works with child items.

Defer date and due date

Each item can optionally have a defer date and/or due date.

• Having a defer date means you can only work on the item on or after the defer date.
• Having a due date means the item must be worked on and completed on or before the due date.

Note that the defer date must be on or before the due date.

When an item has child items, the effective due date of the child item is clamped by the parent's due date. For example, if the parent item is due on June 10th, and the child item is due on June 12th, then for the purpose of planning, the child item will be treated as if it's due on June 10th. This effect extends recursively to descendants.

The effective defer date works similarly, but clamps in the other direction. For example, a child item deferred to June 10th will be effectively deferred to June 12th if its parent is deferred to June 12th.

Item repetition

An item can be repeated if it has a due date. In the editor dialog, options for repetition will appear if a due date is defined.

When an item is repeating, marking the item as completed will repeat it instead of actually marking it as completed. The due date will be moved forward, and the defer date will be set to one day after the previous due date.

You can also optionally define an end date of the repetition. If an end date is defined, then repetition will last as long as the next repetition's due date is on or before the repetition end date.

You can also optionally set whether to repeat on completion. If set, then the repetition logic will treat the day-of-completion as the current due date, instead of the original due date defined on the item. This is useful if the task itself represents something that must be done within some deadline after the last completion, such as laundry, instead of being bound to calendar time, such as tasks that must be done on weekends.

You can also check the "auto-set defer date on repeat" option. If set, this option will control the new defer date on repeat, instead of setting it to one day after the previous due date. Note that the auto-set defer date logic only applies to the current item being repeated, and does not apply to its child items.

The planning engine will take repetition into account when generating the schedules.