Tracks

Thank you for Tracks

2008-05-17T16:56:00+00:00

Just a quick word to BSAG and all of the contributes to say Thank You for the awesome app that is Tracks. I’ve searched high and low for a simple todo list app and, other than OmniFocus which is too expensive for me, none of them are half as good as Tracks, plus Tracks has the added benefit of being multi-user so I might be able to get my wife to start using too I’m hoping I’ll be able to contribute a little bit too, if there are enough hours in the day. Thanks again.

Enhancement Request

2008-10-13T19:50:39+00:00

Hello all, please advise me on where i should put this if this is not the optimal place.

In my line of work i often not only have projects and task for that project, but also specs and business notes are a large part of my daily work flow.

What i would like to see is a more integrated notes section of tracks. Imagine something like google notes capabilities merged into tracks.

Notes and notebooks could be separate and searchable while still associating notebooks or sections in a note book to a task.

Thoughts? Hope i’m not beating a dead horse here but searching the forums didnt reveal it to be so.

Where Tracks is failing to implement GTD

2008-07-31T16:59:14+00:00

First of all, I would like to say that I ABSOLUTELY appreciate your work and I find it AMAZING. Otherwise I would not decide to invest my time to (consturctively) criticize it. What follows is some criticism to make it even better.

Short summary: I think that Tracks fails to implement some basic GTD things and that to change it does not need too much technical effort at all, it needs some thinking and sublte touches thought.

David Allen in his book advocates some basic practices which together make the whole GTD system. Tracks system does not intentionally implement the suggested workflow in a rigid way (you back it up by allowing flexibility in your post ) but it rather offers framework which can be used by users in various ways. I - as a programmer myself - appreciate this flexibility, but I think it is confusing for people which do not see the underlaying “database/code” structure.

There are lot of small things which can back what I am saying as an example I start with the main menu. Nonprogrammer coming from GTD would expect to see something like:

* Inbox
* Next actions
* Projects
* Someday/Maybe
* Waiting for
* Ticker file
* Calendar
* Reference

instead she sees:
* Home
* Contexts
* Projects
* Tickler
* Done
* Notes
* Preferences
* Export

which is very different. Ok, let’s give it a “try”. Let us start with the “Collection” phase to “Inbox”.

The button in the right form says “Add action” which by itself is confusing. Does it insert Actions? Or stuff in Inbox? Who knows. Ok ...She tries to enter something in inbox - fills in descriptions and hits “Add action”.

Whoops. 1 error prohibited this action from being saved There were problems with the following fields: Context can’t be blank ...

Why the context could not be empty? Inbox items have NO context, they are just list of the open loops in your life, no actions, just collection. What to do? There might be many possible ideas. Maybe adding new context “no context”, maybe adding context “inbox” ... which itself is wierd, because inbox is NOT context at all.

Ok, so I have 50 items in inbox and I proceed according to David Allens book with “Process” phase and I expect Tracs to help me with it, which is the role of any such software - to facilite COllection and Processing.

I go through items and decide what to do with them, there are these options:

1. Trash them ... there is a nice X at each item. Perfect, this works as expected.
2. Put them to someday/ ... well, that is not so obvious? The programmers solution would be to put it to some hidden something (context, project), but this is absolutely unintuitive for a normal person.
3. Put them to reference ... it is not obvious how to do that either, but let us say that the reference as such is not implemented ... could elaborate on that later if you want.
4. It is under 2 mins action -> do it and delete it. Perfect, we already know how to do that.
5. It is single action longer thatn 2 mins -> we want to put it to some mext action list and optionally attach context to it. Again we struggle when there is no context, so probably we introduce some artificial “no context” context. At this moment the “context” attribute is used to at least three very different purposes - collecting inbox stuff, hiding maybes, and serving as a real context. This is not good.
6. Delegate it - the is no delegation in tracs, so probably we reuse contexts fourth time? At this time it is clear that the “context” has only partially to do something with real context, so it is misnamed at least.
7. Make a project - jupiii, we have this one clearly here. Shame that it is not easy to convert item from inbox to project easily, so we put the text to cllipboard, if there are notes, we cut paste them to newly opened text editor window and create new project, pasting everything back (ok, I do not want to underestimate non programmers, but I thing that even this may make some “normal” people feel uncomfortable at least). We have new project and we can even nicely put new nenxt actions to it and attach contexts to it. Here - again - we came across the “context mess” because next action from a project put in the inbox context really makes no sense.

That is it. I could elaborate on other thigs as well, and I will if you are interested, but I hope you get the idea for the moment.

I thing something should be done with it. I feel that these issues do not need too much rewriting of the code, rather they would need some serious thinking and some touches to interface. Or maybe a tutorial on tracks? Who knows? If we want to follow David Allens “Natural planning” approach it is too early to offer solutions now anyway, it is time to define the problem and set up the goal to solve it once it is identified. Only after that we can talk about solutions.

So my only questions to end up my post is: Do you understand what I mean and do you agree that there might be a problem?

Regards
Jakub

Copy Projects

2008-08-23T15:55:07+00:00

Does anyone else think it’d be helpful if one could copy projects (and maybe actions and etc.) to new events?

Like, say I make a “going to the beach this summer” project and i but all kinds of stuff in it like a packing list and call for lodging reservations and restaurant reservations and etc. wouldn’t it be nice to go to my completed items, and say that i want to copy the “going to the beach this summer” project so that i can do all that again another time/year

multi language

2008-04-14T07:34:25+00:00

I don’t know how this is progressing, but I could offer to translate to German, if that’s needed.

Suggestion on Implementation of re-order Next Actions

2008-04-09T00:40:31+00:00

Based on my experience using What’s Next App, I think I have a suggestion on how to implement re-ordering of Next Actions that should be relatively easy to implement. Not sure if this has been suggested before.

As is (v1.5), I believe that Tracks display Next Actions (group by context) in the order of actions with earliest due date are shown first then actions with no due date are shown in the order they were created. Is this the case?

My suggestion is to have two views in the ‘home’ page. One called ‘Normal’ or ‘Sortable’ and the other called ‘Due Date’. All Next Actions (with or without due date) will have an additional field (in the database) to record the ranking (or positioning order). When in ‘Normal/Sortable’ view, all Next Actions (including those with due date) are sortable (within their respective context). So it is up to the user to re-order his Next Actions as he sees fit. To bring focus to actions that are due soon (or in the next few days), show on the right hand side bar ‘Actions due in the next 7 days’. This side bar will be filtered by a drop down combo box to select which context the actions belong to. So if you select ‘office’ as the context, then only the actions with context ‘office’ with due dates within the next 7 days are shown. This way user can sort next actions as he sees fit, and still be able to easily see actions with due dates approaching.

For those who like things the way they are, click on the ‘Due Date’ view and the list will no longer be sortable, and will be displayed as it currently is, actions with nearest due dates before actions with no due dates which are sorted by date of creation. In this view, the list is not sortable, so when going back to the ‘Normal/Sortable’ view, the list will again be shown in the order as it was left before.

For tickler tasks, when they need to be displayed, show them at the bottom of the list (in ‘Normal/Sortable’ view, while in ‘Due Date’ view will be shown depending on due date or creation date).

Moving a task to another context again will cause the task to be shown at the bottom of the list in the new context (in ‘Normal/Sortable’ view), while all other tasks below this task in the original context will be moved up by one.

I hope I made myself clear. But I think this is not too difficult to implement. I can understand your problem with sortable action if you still want to show actions with nearest due date at the top. By having the sidebar view, this is no longer necessary. Of course if for those who like things the way it is, they can always default their view to ‘Due Date’ and never click on the ‘Normal/Sortable’ view. The sidebar view can be shown only in ‘Normal/Sortable’ view or in both views although it won’t be of much use in ‘Due Date’ view as the same information is already displayed in the lists themselves.

Check out What’s Next App (http://www.whatsnextapp.com) for what I meant regarding the side view bar showing actions due in the next 7 days.

WhatsNextApp

2008-04-07T09:27:52+00:00

I just started to try using Tracks. I have been using What’s Next App (http://www.whatsnextapp.com) for sometime now (but the project appears to be dead). I only started using Tracks since I found Bitnami Tracks Stack (http://www.bitnami.org).

I do have a few things I missed from What’s Next App which I hope Tracks can learn/borrow from.
1. Easy installation.
What’s Next App has a pre-package with Ruby runtime. All I need to do to install is extract the zip, run a .bat file and point my web-browser to http://localhost:3300. Although Bitnami Tracks Stack makes it easy to install, it is still very bloated (with Apache, MySQL, etc) for those that only need to use Tracks off-line on a single PC as a personal GTD tool.
2. Re-order Next Actions.
What’s Next App allows Next Actions to be re-ordered (via drag and drop) to allow ordering of next actions in the order of the very next actions. I know that Tracks currently do not support this but this is in the plan. I do hope that this is sometime soon.
3. Move a Next Action to Tickler easily.
What’s Next App allows for easily click a Next Action and set it as Deferred (What’s Next App’s equivalent of Tickler) with a deferred date. I use this for a recurring action. For example a weekly pay for catering action. Once I have done the action, I deferred that action to next week. Come next week the deferred action will become a next action ready to be done and then deferred again.
4. Search.
What’s Next App allows to search for Next Actions, Projects, Contexts, etc. Does Tracks allow for this?

Jeff

First weekly review with Tracks

2008-02-23T21:46:25+00:00

Wow, I just went through my first weekly review with Tracks version 1.043 on Friday afternoon. It was an amazingly efficient experience, which is not something I could say about my old outlook based GTD system. Thanks for a great system.

Matt

Tracks mentioned in local paper (Austin, TX)

2008-01-27T16:45:57+00:00

There was an article in my local paper this morning on GTD. There was a mention of Tracks by one of the journalists who uses it!

http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/other/01/27/0127guide.html

From the article:

“The last major component of GTD that I use is a comprehensive to-do list. I use multiple computers at home and at work and I have terrible handwriting, so I rely on a program called “Tracks” that is housed online. I can access it from any Web browser or from a cell phone and it keeps track of tasks and projects, including things to do at home, errands to run and things I’m waiting on (mail-in rebates, e-mail responses).

I still use a Palm Pilot, so with Tracks and the Palm’s calendar software, I’ve got a pretty comprehensive list of tasks and upcoming appointments and contacts. I check the calendar and to-do list as soon as I get to work and a few times throughout the day to stay on track. I don’t do a weekly review, which would benefit me on longer-term projects, but I’m checking my to-do lists and e-mail folders regularly, so I don’t always feel I need to spend extra time going over the same ground.

â€” Omar L. Gallaga “

The state of GTD web apps

2006-08-27T02:41:47+00:00

I’ve been searching all day for implementations of GTD on the web.

- iCommit, written in PHP. The interface is horrible, and the text is way too small. However, it supports many more GTD features than Tracks.
- MonkeyGTD (use Firefox) than runs on top of TiddlyWiki. It’s very pretty, but the effects are a little annoying. Tracks can learn a lot from it.
- GTDGmail, a firefox extension. For those that have firefox on a memstick and use Gmail, it might be a good implementation. However, tracks was simpler to install for me (I have some basic RoR knowledge) than getting GTDGmail to work.
- Remember The Milk, while not a GTD-centric to-do list service, it can be used as such. It has a very good looking interface.
- Vitalist. It is a GTD application implemented in ASP classic. It’s very pretty (except for the icons). I believe Tracks (which is still my favourite because I can tinker with it) can learn a lot from it.

The problem with all the mentiond apps, including tracks is that they cannot be installed on a mobile or PDA. Meaning, they require connectivity, and the mobile companies skin you alive with their $1 per megabyte rates.

I just read their policy. It will only be free during the beta, which might suck if they want to charge an arm and a leg like 37signal charges for their products.