How to sort birthdays (recurring tasks)?

[janeoa]

I have set up profiles of my friends and family in Obsidian and have a #birthday tag on each of them.
Ex: - [ ] #birthday Dad 🔁 every year 🛫 1969-03-19

I have a note with

tags include #birthday 

block and it does it job pretty well

I now want to sort it by the approaching dates.
The default "no sort" behaviour puts the list randomly.
Using the sort by recurrence seem to have check only the existence of the property and not by the next recurrence. Not sure if tasks even has next recurrence as a property. Sorting by it would be very great.

Correct me if I missed the "next recurrence" property or could you please add this as a feature?

[aubreyz]

I don't use scheduled dates at all, but you can sort by scheduled date, no?
sort by scheduled

[claremacrae]

@janeoa

Your current task lines

That task is reminding you to do something for your Dad in 1969, via its Start date. When you complete the task, a copy of that task will be created, and it will be set to Start in 1970.

This is unlikely to be the behaviour you want.

How to fix the birthday tasks

For the Tasks fields, you should put the date of the next birthday (or the date when you need to prepare for it!)

So you could do something like:

- [ ] #birthday Dad (1969) 🔁 every year 🛫 2025-03-19

Or

- [ ] #birthday Dad (1969-03-19) 🔁 every year 🛫 2025-03-19

How to then sort the birthdays

If you do that for all the birthday tasks, then @aubreyz suggestion of sorting will work fine. It's a start date, so you would say:

sort by start

[janeoa]

Thanks for the instant reply! I value it

I will try ur suggestion

[claremacrae]

I've edited the reply to suggest that you might use the date when you need to start preparing for the birthdays, rather than the actual birthday...

Or you can use Due for the birthday, Scheduled for when to start working on it, for example...

See https://publish.obsidian.md/tasks/Getting+Started/Dates

[notanovel]

Hello, sorry for bumping this one up again.

I was wondering if in the meantime, since the last answer, there have been any changes that would allow to use the actual birth-date to be "captured" every year?

So just have this entry once and in the query, "due next week" would make the birthday pop up every year, a week before the birthday.

- [ ] #birthday Dad 🔁 every year 🛫 1969-03-19

[claremacrae]

Hi, @notanovel, no nothing has changed, because the Tasks plugin is still behaving as designed.

Please read - carefully - my answer in #2814 (comment) - which is still describing how the plugin works, and how you can fix your task to make it appear in date-based queries.

[notanovel]

Clear, thanks for getting back!
Fully aware that the plugin is working as intended.
If at some point, something like "ignore year" or "ignore YYYY", will be possible to be added to a query, that could be a workaround.

Regardless, thanks a lot for the plugin, it's very handy!

[claremacrae]

You can already write a custom query to do that.

[notanovel]

ok thank you - I will do my homework and will take another close look at the documentation.

[claremacrae]

Excellent... Do give it a go, and after having looked at the docs, you would like help with what you tried, I'm happy to help...

Alternatively, please share what worked for you, to help others!