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