Multiple Scheduled Timestamps for One Task

Question

Suppose I want to be reminded to water my plants on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, AND on any of the following days, if for some reason I miss the scheduled days.

I originally tried the following:

*** water plants (1,3,5)
    SCHEDULED: <2016-08-29 Mon ++1w><2016-08-31 Wed ++1w><2016-08-26 Fri ++1w>

This does not work -- only the first timestamp is scheduled. The other two are treated as regular timestamps.

I also tried the following, and it does not work:

*** water plants (1,3,5)
    SCHEDULED: <2016-08-29 Mon ++1w>
    SCHEDULED: <2016-08-31 Wed ++1w>
    SCHEDULED: <2016-08-26 Fri ++1w>

Eventually, I tried this, and it worked:

*** water plants (1,3,5)

**** RECURRING water plants (1)
     SCHEDULED: <2016-08-29 Mon ++1w>
**** RECURRING water plants (3)
     SCHEDULED: <2016-08-31 Wed ++1w>
**** RECURRING water plants (5) 
     SCHEDULED: <2016-08-26 Fri ++1w>

All three occurrences now show up on my agenda. However, this solution seems very inelegant, and perhaps may be problematic. Is there a neater, more effective way to do achieve the same result?

Answer 1

I think org habits is suitable for this task.

Otherwise I actually don't see any problem with your current approach. They can indeed be regarded as three separate tasks anyways, since they're quite independent of each other, e.g. whether you watered on Monday doesn't have any impact on whether you'd still have to water it on Wednesday, so why not just leave it as it is? Maybe you can even remove the (1) (3) (5) there so they all show up as "water plants", just separately, as you wished.

Or maybe you can look at this answer. Though I think your current approach actually makes more sense.

Answer 2

If you want the tasks to just appear in the agenda without being able to disappear with them using keyword DONE (this is what happens when you set DONE to a task with SCHEDULED keywork), you might try:

*** water plants (1,3,5)
<2016-08-29 Mon ++1w>
<2016-08-31 Wed ++1w>
<2016-08-26 Fri ++1w>

in other words: just do not use keyword SCHEDULED.