Short answer

Work to the week, not the day. Set aside a bit of time each Friday to schedule the following week's work: give every one-off job a due date inside that week, and check where any monthly or quarterly routine falls. Then have everyone set the due window on their phone to Week rather than Today, with Hide completed tasks on. The week's work appears in each person's list on the Monday morning, they have the whole week to clear it, and nothing is hidden by a filter. The common failure is the opposite order: telling people to filter to Today when nothing has been scheduled onto a specific day, so the list looks empty and the app looks broken.

Detail

The daily-list pattern — everyone opens the app, filters to Today, and clears their list — is the right one for councils whose work genuinely lands daily: bin rounds, toilet cleans, park checks. It depends entirely on the scheduling behind it. If the work is not scheduled onto the day, filtering to that day shows nothing.

Plenty of councils don't work that way. A small team doing buildings compliance will do a round of checks in one or two sittings whenever the week allows. For them the week is the unit, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The Friday planning habit. Once a week, someone (usually the clerk or deputy) looks at the week ahead:

  • One-off jobs get a due date inside that week. A job with no due date, or one months out, is invisible to everyone's filter.
  • Routines are checked for where they fall. A weekly routine is usually already anchored to a consistent weekday, so it needs nothing. A monthly, quarterly or annual routine is the one to look at, because it is anchored to a calendar date rather than a weekday (see the watch-out below).
  • Anything left from last week is either moved into this week or closed off. Work that is genuinely not going to happen should be cancelled rather than left to age.

The field setup that matches it. In the mobile filter panel (the filter button, top right):

  • Show tasks due → Week — the current week, Monday to Sunday. Everything scheduled for the week is visible from Monday morning, whichever day it is due.
  • Hide completed tasks — the list shrinks as work is ticked off, so what's left is always outstanding.
  • Assigned to → Me — each person sees their own work.

A due date at the end of the week (a Friday, say) works well with this. The work is visible from Monday, the whole week is available to do it in, and it only becomes overdue if the week is missed entirely. A Monday due date gives no forward view: it appears on the day, and it is overdue by Tuesday.

Moving a single occurrence rather than the whole series. Each occurrence of a routine is its own row in the Routines list with its own Due Date. To move one month's round into a different week, open that occurrence, change the Due Date, and when asked, choose Update this routine ONLY. The rest of the series stays exactly where it is. Choosing Apply to the … series from [date] instead would re-anchor every occurrence from then on, which is occasionally what you want but usually isn't. See How to Edit a Routine.

This is a much lighter fix than rebuilding a routine, and it makes the Friday session the natural place to do it.

Watch-outs

  • A monthly routine anchored to a calendar date will land on a weekend. A routine set to the 14th of the month moves through the week as the months pass, and over a year it will fall on a Saturday or a Sunday three or four times. If that round is 70-odd checks, they are all overdue by Monday through nobody's fault. Check where the date falls as part of the weekly planning, and move the occurrence if it lands badly. The same applies to quarterly and annual checks, where a bad date can sit unnoticed for months.
  • Don't set the filter to Today if you aren't scheduling daily. It is the usual advice, and it is the wrong setting here: it hides work due later in the week, including work your team is doing ahead of time. Someone working a Friday round on the Tuesday sees an empty list and reasonably concludes the app has lost their jobs.
  • Working ahead of the due date is normal and fine. A check completed two days early is not a data problem. It is what a team does when it has the time.
  • A big round is not automatically a problem. Thirty checks due on one day sounds alarming next to a daily list, but if your team does that round in a sitting or two, it matches how you work. Check whether the work is actually getting done before you restructure anything.
  • Sign the routine off once its checks are done. The individual tasks being complete does not close the routine itself, so it will sit there showing overdue with all the work underneath it finished. Worth building into the weekly review.
  • Splitting a routine is not an edit. If the weekly review keeps showing one round that is genuinely too big for the day it lands on, splitting it means deleting the routine and rebuilding it as separate ones, so treat it as a planned piece of work rather than a quick tweak.