Background

We introduced how to improve your work efficiency by Notion daily tasks in last artical,Meanwhile,we find two issues as below:

Notion is unable to support recurring tasks,For example,daily review,daily meeting .
you need manually update CompletedDate for Notion tasks, If not, You will still see the tasks that already completed yesterday.

Requirements

Recurring tasks

Requirement
Create template page for recurring tasks and create recurring tasks in this template page
Query recurring tasks in template page, Create different recurring tasks by different recurring task types,For example, Homework review is workday task , Nucleic acid testing is weekly taskk, and some tasks only occurs on specific days(Monday,Thursday etc)

Automatically update task status

Requirement
Task is already expired ,We need to complete this task ASAP,So mark this task as Doing Status to complete this task today
If task will be expired in X days(X shouldn’t be empty or 0),We’d better to mark task status as Todo to avoid forgetting to complete this task
If task will be expired today,Mark task as Doing status
If task expiration date is within date range,Mark task as Doing status
If you forgot to input expiration date for your task yesterday , Update task expirationDate to the date of yesterday,Mark task status as Todo
If task is completed(Task status is Done),Update CompletedDate to the date of yesterday,This task will not show in your daily task board

Solution and Design

Diagram

Recurring tasks creation
Automatically Update daily tasks

Design

Create a Notion database page as template to save recurring tasks

1.1See Cloumn name and values as below:

Column	Value	Comment
Title	task name	task name
Status	TBD,Todo,Doing,Done,Blocker,Invalid,Withdrawn,Unfinishted,OnHold	Task status
Type	WorkDay,SpecificDay,SpecificDateRange	Task type for recurring task
Tag	Work,Life,Python,Docker etc,	custom field
Cycle Date	9/18/2022-9/25/2022	Date range
Cycle Days	From Monday to Sunday，Choose one or more options	From Monday to Sunday
EndDate	Recurring task’s expiration date	Expiration date

2Daily task status

Task Status	Comment
TBD(To be determined)	The tasks need to be completed in the future,But we don’t need to complete it today
Todo	The tasks that need to complete today
Doing	The task that we are doing
Done	The task that already completed
Blocker	The task that we can’t continue working since there are some dependencies
Invalid	Invalid tasks,It’s only used in recurring tasks template page
Withdrawn	The task is not needed
Unfinished	The task that you can’t complete today and this task will be invalid on tomorrow
OnHold	The task that you have already started ,But you can’t complete this task today,You need to continue working on this task on tomorrow

Create Python Code to call Notion API to retrieve the records in Recurring task template page ,Add new records to Daily task page
Create Python code to call NotionAPI to update Notion tasks status
Create azure function -Timer trigger project, Call Python package that we mentioned in previous steps(You also could use jenkins instead of Azure function, see XXX)

Steps

Create recurring task page as template page for daily tasks,Please refer template page in https://stone-fighter-9fa.notion.site/530ba8c6780d4f668235e9b62f697d92?v=c802b9ed6928482c88da55051b41bb32
Develop python code to call Notion API to query recurring tasks in template page, Insert eligible recurring tasks to Daily task page https://stone-fighter-9fa.notion.site/DailyTask-Demo-59a57f31d29b4dfcab5db9d20aeca6ab
Develop python code call Notion API to update task status accordingly

Create Azure funtion timer trigger project to call Notion Python package in the morning. After Azure function triggered, You will see the new recurring task is created and some tasks status are updated accordingly.
Function.json

{
  "scriptFile": "__init__.py",
  "bindings": [
    {
      "name": "mytimer",
      "type": "timerTrigger",
      "direction": "in",
      "schedule": "0 10 16 * * *"
    }
  ]
}

init.py

import datetime
 import logging
 import os
   import azure.functions as func
   from NotionRecurringTask.RecurringTask import RecurringTask   
   def main(mytimer: func.TimerRequest) -> None:
    utc_timestamp = datetime.datetime.utcnow().replace(
    tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc).isoformat()        
 if mytimer.past_due:
   logging.info('The timer is past due!')
 auth=os.environ["Auth"]
 taskConfiguration_dabaseid=os.environ["TaskConfiguration_dabaseid"]
 timeDeltaWithUTC=(int)(os.environ["TimeDeltaWithUTC"])
 databaseid=os.environ["DatabaseID"]
 knotion=RecurringTask()
 knotion.process(auth,taskConfiguration_dabaseid,databaseid,timeDeltaWithUTC)
 logging.info('Python timer trigger function ran at %s', utc_timestamp)

requirement.txt

--index-url=https://test.pypi.org/simple/
azure-functions
requests


NotionRecurringTask-KevinZhou>0.0.7

# git+https://github.com/nightwish2016/NotionRecurringTask.git 

# ./DailyNotionTaskTrigger/dist/NotionRecurringTask_KevinZhou-0.0.1-py3-none-any.whl

Config environment variables in Azure function

Environment Variable	Value
Auth	Access your Notion page,Please referGetting started (notion.com)
DatabaseID	DatabaseId of daily task page
TimeDeltaWithUTC	Time difference between your time zone and UTC time zone, if your time zone is UTC+8(Beijing time zone), Please set value to 8
TaskConfiguration_dabaseid	Databaseid for recurring tasks template page

Configuration

Testing

Testing for task status update

Current date：2022/9/24(utc+8)

Test Case	Test Data	Test Result
Task is already expired ,We need to complete this task ASAP,So mark this task as Doing Status to complete this task today	Name:M117 Regression,ExpirationDate:9/19/2022	Pass,Status:Doing
If task will be expired in X days(X =1),We’d better to mark task status as Todo to avoid forgetting to complete this task	Name:Legacy regression,ExpirationDate:9/25/2022	Pass,Status:ToDo
If task expiration date is within date range,Mark task as Doing status	Name:Production testing Preparation，ExpirationDate:9/19/2022-9/31/2022	Pass,Status:Doing
If you forgot to input expiration date for your task yesterday , Update task expirationDate to the date of yesterday,Mark task status as Todo	Name: Task1,ExpirationDate:empty	Pass,Status:ToDo
If task is completed(Task status is Done),Update CompletedDate to the date of yesterday,This task will not show in your daily task board	Name: Task2,Status:Done	Pass，Status:Done,CompletedDate:Today

Testing for Recurring tasks

Test Case	Test Data	Test Result
If task ype is Workday, Task will be created from Monday to Sunday	Name:M117 Regression,ExpirationDate:9/19/2022	Pass,Task could be able tocreated in workday
if task type is Daily, Task will be created everyday	Name:Sport	Pass,Task could be able to created everyday
If task type is SpecificDay,Task will be created in specific days(Monday,Sunday)	Name：Nucleic acid testing，Cycle Days:Wednesday,SunDay	Pass,Task will be created on Wednesday and Sunday
If task type is SpecificDateRange,task will be created envery day in Specific date range	Name:check for CBS automation test results,Cycle Date:9/1/2022-9/30/2022	Pass,Task will created each day from 9/1/2022 to 9/30/2022
If task is expired in template page, Recurring task will not be created in daily task page	Name:Docker practice,EndDate:8/31/2022	Pass,Task will not be created since task is expired