📋 Before you start
Jobs vs reminders — the useful distinction.
They look similar and people reasonably ask why there are two. The split is:
- A job is work you do. Drench the ewes, fix the water trough, shear. It has a due date, it can be attached to animals or a paddock, it can carry treatment details, and you mark it complete.
- A reminder is something to watch for. A due date to keep an eye on — a breeding date approaching, a crop ready, a rego expiring. Nothing to tick off as done work.
💡 If you're not sure, use a job
Jobs are the more capable of the two — they can carry treatment details, withholding periods and repeats. A reminder is the lighter option for "just tell me when". Nothing is lost either way, and both land in the same calendar.
1️⃣ Creating a job
Five flavours, depending on what it's about.
Use + Job from the Jobs card, from the quick-capture row, or — better where it applies — from an animal (+ Record → Job) or a paddock, which attaches it automatically. The form starts by asking which kind:
- + Animal Job — reveals the animal targeting options.
- + Paddock Job — reveals the paddock picker.
- + Garden Job — a task in the veg garden: sow, plant out, water, feed, weed, mulch, prune. Pick a crop and a bed if you like, and set Repeat every for the ones that come round. It shows on the Garden card, the Calendar and Today's Brief like any other job.
- + Orchard Job — the same for trees, vines and berries: prune, thin, feed, net. Choose Spray / treat (here or in a Garden Job) and you're asked how many days before picking the label says to wait. The crop then shows Don't pick before… until that date passes, and logging a harvest inside the wait asks you to check first.
- + Other Job — general farm work.
Then a due date and optional due time, and a title.
Who it applies to
For an animal job you choose Single animal, Entire herd, or Select animals — the last giving you a tick list you can filter by herd, with select-all and clear. That's the one to use for "the six that need it" rather than treating the whole mob.
2️⃣ Treatment jobs and withholding
The part that earns its keep.
A job can carry treatment details: the product used, the treatment type, the date and optional time given, and withholding periods for meat, milk, eggs and wool plus a custom one with your own label.
Complete the job and the treatment is recorded against those animals with the withholding tracked from it.
⏰ Add the time, not just the date
Withholding is calculated to the hour when you give it a time. Without one you get a whole-day estimate, which is safe but costs you up to a day at the other end. If you drenched at 7am, say so.
Set your products up once in Products & Chemicals with their label withholding periods, and selecting a product fills those dates in for you. Withholding then surfaces where it matters — a warning when you try to move stock into an affected paddock, or record production from an animal still inside the window.
3️⃣ Repeating work
Set it once for the things that come round.
Jobs and treatments both take a repeat every N days / weeks / months / years, with the next due date worked out for you. That covers the rhythm of a block — six-weekly drenching, annual vaccinations, quarterly servicing — without you rebuilding the job each time.
Mark a job complete with its completion date and time, and the next one appears on schedule.
4️⃣ Reminders
Lighter, for dates you just want to see coming.
+ Reminder takes a type — Breeding due date, Pasture / crop or General farm reminder — a date and optional time, a title, and optionally an animal, herd or paddock to attach it to. Tick it as completed or no longer needed when it's served its purpose.
Plenty of reminders create themselves: breeding milestones from the Animals timeline, candling and hatch days from an incubation batch, the drench follow-up about twelve days after a drench, and pet treatment and registration dates.
5️⃣ Where things surface
You shouldn't have to go looking.
- Today's Brief — the action centre, plus a this week on your block card covering the next seven days.
- The farm calendar — everything dated, in month or week view.
- Notifications — if you've allowed them, due work reaches your phone. The native iOS and Android apps do this properly; that's the main practical reason to install the app rather than only using the browser.
Items are grouped by urgency — overdue, today, due soon and upcoming — so the list sorts itself into what actually needs you.
✅ What the app does vs what you do
The honest split.
My Block Hand handles: dated jobs and reminders attached to animals, herds and paddocks; treatment recording with meat, milk, egg, wool and custom withholding calculated to the hour; repeat scheduling and next-due dates; automatic reminders from breeding, incubation, drenching and pet care; urgency grouping; and notifications.
You still have to: mark work done — an uncompleted job is just a wish; check your own product labels; and decide what actually needs doing. The app carries the dates, not the judgement.
🌱 The farming behind the feature
Want to understand the principles, not just the screens?
Reminders earn their keep on the jobs that come in two parts. A vaccination booster is the clearest example: it falls due weeks after the first dose, and it's the step most often missed on a small farm. For the farming side of that — what the vaccines protect against and why finishing the course matters — read the Farm Guide: Livestock vaccination for small farms.
This guide describes My Block Hand as at July 2026. Withholding periods must come from your own product labels — the app calculates from what you enter and is not a substitute for reading the bottle.