Why recurring events matter daily
The first time I tried to set up a recurring event, I thought it would be simple — you just pick repeat daily, done, right. But what actually happened was the event repeated at midnight, and I meant it for mornings. The difference was small on the screen, just one dropdown that looked correct but actually defaulted to a hidden timezone offset. So instead of reminding me at 8am like I expected, I kept getting a buzz while still asleep. Not exactly helpful. Once I dug around, I realized almost every app sneakily hides these details on separate settings screens, so you end up chasing toggles across calendars. If you skip this, your whole habit‑tracking routine falls apart quickly. That misfire cost me a week where I thought I was just lazy, but actually the reminder was never landing when I needed it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Setting up the first repeating block
I found the trick with most calendar tools is to pick a neutral anchor time that will never get shifted by daylight savings or app updates. For example, I used 7am because that’s before any scheduled calls and before the system tries to play with time zones. Once you pick that, test it — literally advance your computer clock a day to make sure the reminder fires two days in a row. I know it sounds silly to change the system clock just to check, but after watching a reminder vanish for no reason once, I don’t trust anything until I’ve seen it physically show up twice. My personal go‑to is Google Calendar because it syncs across devices without too much fuss, but even that sometimes decides to rename your recurring series when editing only one instance. If you delete the wrong one, poof, all the daily habits are gone. The safe way is always duplicate the event before you touch its repeat settings 🙂
Using automation instead of calendar alerts
After getting burned by disappearing calendar notifications, I leaned on Zapier to send me recurring messages. Basically Zapier does not have a true “every day at X time” option until you set up a Schedule trigger, but once you do, it sends the message reliably. Except when it doesn’t. One time my zap paused because I had too many tasks queued, and I did not notice for days. So now I lock a daily Slack DM to myself at set intervals and in parallel I still keep the calendar entry. Double redundancy means even if one fails, the other pokes me. The actual setup is choosing Schedule by Zapier set to every day, then sending message to Slack. The interface hides the frequency toggle under a small link that says “show advanced.” If you miss that, you think you’ve set it daily when it’s actually weekly, and the routine crumbles by Thursday. I can’t count how many times habits fell apart over this tiny oversight.
Making events visible across all screens
The moment something works on your laptop but not your phone, it kills motivation fast. I once added an evening journaling reminder on desktop, perfect time, everything looked locked in. Then on phone, no event. Turns out my phone was subscribed only to my work calendar, not personal, and the recurring event was sitting quietly unsynced. Here’s a quick way to prevent that: open both views side by side, one on computer, one on phone, and create a single test daily event that fires in 2 minutes. If your devices both give the notification at that exact moment, you’re good. If not, you troubleshoot before you even waste a week. And yes, doing that test feels obsessive, but I saved myself the embarrassment of realizing none of my meditation reminders had ever synced after I kept missing them. No error messages showed up, nothing — the events just silently never appeared. It is one of those bugs where the absence of error looks like success until you realize nothing actually happened. 😛
Pairing habits with trigger events
I also learned that the best way to keep daily events from feeling like empty popups is pairing them with specific trigger actions. For example, I wanted to stretch each morning. Instead of having a calendar event just called “stretch,” I tied it to the recurring event of making coffee. So the notification literally says “Stretch while coffee brews.” It’s not just about remembering, it makes the habit real because my brain links it to an event already happening. To do this in apps like Todoist, you can set a recurring task to repeat daily at a relative time like “every day at 7am” but also add it under a project labeled “Morning routine.” Then it shows up clustered with similar tasks, which prevents me from swiping it away without thinking. The clustering matters more than I expected — when habits look like they live together, you actually follow through more consistently. Without this, I found myself dismissing random popups without caring.
Stacking multiple habits without overload
I made the mistake of setting ten different daily events the first week. Horrible idea. Every hour my phone buzzed, and within two days I muted everything. Lesson learned. The fix was stacking just three events around anchor times. For example, morning launch is water plus stretch, midday anchor is short walk, evening one is journaling. Only three reminders, but each reminder actually reminds me of multiple actions. You can cheat this by writing the event title as a mini checklist like “Water plus stretch” so it feels like a bundle instead of single fragmented notes. If you try this with too many, your notifications look like spam — and trust me, your brain ignores spam fast. I did a little test by listing habits in a simple table to see how they stick. For me it looks like this:
| Anchor time | Habit bundle | |-------------|------------------------| | Morning | Drink water Stretch | | Midday | Walk outside 10 mins | | Evening | Journal 5 mins |
This exact table taped to my monitor reminded me better than any app notification sometimes. Not flashy, just simple text that doesn’t vanish if the app crashes.
Recovering when recurring events fail
There was a week where my recurring tasks just stopped firing because my Zapier account hit task limits and my calendar temporarily unsynced while offline. Suddenly every single daily habit vanished, and I only realized after noticing I had not checked any tasks off in days. So my recovery method now is to store a dumb plain text copy of my schedule in Notes app. That way when automations inevitably collapse, I can still rebuild them in a few minutes. Honestly it feels stupid writing the same events into three different places, but it beats the emotional crash when you think your self discipline failed, when in reality the system failed first. If you keep that backup, you can laugh when tools misbehave instead of blaming yourself 🙂 The ironic thing is that the events fail silently — no red error message, no alert, nothing — you just wake up to an empty calendar wondering what happened.
Practical example from a ruined Monday
I’ll end with a real Monday that made me adopt this redundancy rule forever. I woke up, no morning reminder. I thought maybe I just accidentally snoozed it. At noon, still no ping for my walk. By evening I realized my main account had disconnected from Google, so my automations were firing into a void. I lost a whole day of momentum because nothing poked me to act. Now I check connections every weekend like clockwork. It is not glamorous, it feels like babysitting apps, but that’s what makes the routines actually stick. When you see it fail in silence once, you never quite trust it again without backups.