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The Monday before the first Wednesday of every month

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Today I received a series of 12 new calendar appointments for 'the Monday before the first Wednesday of every month' from a colleague. It turns out they are just reminders to make sure I complete a task by a certain date. My first thought was "Whoah! What a lot of meeting requests!" which quickly turned into "Heck, why didn't you just send a recurring meeting request?" which then evolved into "Hey dude, why didn't you think to send a recurring delegated task instead?"

The problem though with this particular reminder is that it needs to occur on the 'Monday before the first Wednesday of the month'. But Outlook doesn't allow you to specify something as bizarre as this. You can only specify a single level recurrence, like the 'last Monday of the month'. As soon as you get into 'the last Wednesday before the 3rd moon after the green rabbit appears', Outlook is a little out of its depth. So the real answer here is that the requested 'Monday before the first Wednesday' was too complicated a policy and 'the last Monday of the month' probably would have been adequate. This is not so much a technical issue as an unnecessarily complex business procedure.

Next time I have to set up a recurring request, I'll firstly think about whether I should adapt the business procedure to give my fellow Outlook users an easier life. I'll also decide whether a calendar appointment is the best tool in the box. If you're really asking someone to 'do something' rather than 'meet somewhere' sending a task is often a better way to get them to comply.

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