Short answer

Put the day pattern in the title. A council with three bin routines on the same Old Town round — Monday/Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday/Thursday — should call them Old Town bin route — Mon/Wed, Old Town bin route — Fri, Old Town bin route — Tue/Thu. The route name alone isn't enough to tell them apart in the routines list, the task list, or the audit log.

Detail

A common pattern in councils is one geographic round (one "route") that's serviced on different days for different bins — the high-traffic shop bins go daily, the residential pavement bins go Mon/Wed/Fri, the side-street bins go Tue/Thu. Each frequency needs its own routine because Civic.ly's recurrence model is "one frequency per routine".

The mistake is calling all of those routines by the same name — "Old Town bin route". When you scan the routines list or the day's task list you can't tell which is which without opening each one to check the frequency. Worse, if someone needs to edit a single routine, they'll have to drill in to confirm they're editing the right one.

Suggested naming format: <Round name> — <day pattern>. Examples:

  • Old Town bin route — Mon/Wed
  • Old Town bin route — Fri
  • Old Town bin route — Tue/Thu
  • Old Town bin route — Daily (shop bins)
  • Riverside Park grass cut — Apr–Sep monthly
  • Cemetery hedge trim — Bi-annual

The pattern is: keep the round name stable as a prefix (so they sort and filter together), and append the differentiator in a way that reads naturally to the supervisor. The day suffix is the most common differentiator; for seasonal or frequency-based variants, use the season or frequency.

What not to do:

  • Don't include the operatives' names in the title (e.g. Old Town bin route — Darren & John). The operatives are assignees, not route identifiers. People leave, get reassigned, or cover for each other; the route name shouldn't depend on them.
  • Don't include the bin type or any sub-detail that isn't a real differentiator at the routine level.

Watch-outs

  • Operatives don't see routine names on their mobile app — they see the list of jobs for the day. So the naming convention is for supervisors and the audit log, not for the field crew. That doesn't make it less important; the supervisor needs it to manage absences and changes.
  • Renaming a routine is safe — it propagates to future occurrences, and the historical task records keep the title they had at the time. So you can fix bad names retrospectively without harm.
  • If you're fixing several things at once, delete and rebuild is usually quicker than editing. When a council has multiple routines all titled the same and with the wrong end date and with the wrong assignee list, the cleanest path is delete the routines and recreate them from scratch with the right shape. Editing each in place means touching the title, the end date, the bin list, and the assignees — four edits per routine. Rebuilding is one pass per routine. The asset register isn't affected by the delete — the bins stay put, only the schedule layer gets cleared.