How to repeat an appointment within an interval

Question

I'm using org-mode and the agenda for weekly planning, kind of like a calendar. Entries include things like "sleeping 11pm to 6am" and "gym 3pm to 5pm", or even "read dresden files 8pm to 9pm". I use regular active timestamps for this.

Say I have to be somewhere 9am to 5pm every day except Sundays for the next 5 weeks.

Things I've thought of:

• Use org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift, manually delete any Sundays, and put it all in its own subtree so I can archive it later. If the schedule changes, it's quite a bit of error prone editing work.
• Single headline with multiple (30) active timestamps. That way, at least I can use column editing to shift times around. Still a lot of noise, though.
• Put an entry with 6 repeating stamps (every day except Sunday) in its own file, remove from agenda files when done.

I want to keep past schedules for reference (i.e.: what was my schedule 23 days ago? How much time was I putting into the gym last month? Have I been scheduling enough reading time recently? And so on), so completely removing things from the agenda (such as temporary files in agenda-files) is not very useful to me.

How would you handle a situation like this in your agenda?

Is there a reason org-mode doesn't support an "end" mark for repeating entries?

Answer 1

How would you handle a situation like this in your agenda?

org-clone-subtree-wth-time-shift is indeed the most flexible of the options you have listed. From the documentation:

you can spell out a number of instances of a repeating task, and still retain the repeater to cover future instances of the task

and

Setting N to 0, then, can be used to remove the repeater from a subtree

would be useful in your case when you have scheduled something but have not done it. For example,

How much time was I putting into the gym last month?

because as we know scheduling in the calendar is one thing and actually keeping track of whether it was done (task logging) is another thing. Since you want to combine the two, you need a way to delete those entries that have been scheduled but not completed.

Therefore, org-clone-subtree-wth-time-shift seems like the best option.