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What do I Like about GTD Tracks? Let Me Count the Ways [GTD Wannabe]

I recently told you that I’ve picked GTD Tracks (a hosted Tracks implementation, Tracks being a Ruby on Rails application) and my latest GTD tool. I didn’t get much of a chance to tell you what I liked about it.

Background

I’ve run into a couple of blog posts here and there about Tracks in general. The best post was over at Cube Rules. Scot does an excellent job of showing you how to use Tracks for GTD. He goes even further than I do, since he uses Tracks for general reference information too, e.g., what wines to buy.

It seemed like a good idea, but I was initially intimidated by the concept of trying to host it myself. However, once I saw how easy it was (and cheap) to make use of a hosted implementation, e.g., GTD Tracks, I decided to give it a shot.

What Do I Like

Let’s go through my list.

Look

First of all, I love the look. I like the colours, I like how the deadlines are shown in different colours, based on how close (or overdue) they are. The only thing I would change would be to use more of my horizontal space by using three columns instead of two.

Installation

Installation was very easy, since it’s an online app. Well, it is possible to install it yourself, but there are a couple of hosted versions of it: GTD Tracks and tracks.tra.in, to name a couple.

Search

Admittedly, there’s no native search ability. However, I have found that I can make do with using FireFox’s search - enough information is shown on most pages that I can find the particular next action I’m looking for pretty quickly. In addition, since I’ve started using it, I find I don’t search very often anymore. Since my information is not hidden in a text file, I don’t tend to “lose” things. Especially when I do a good review.

No Limits

There are no appreciable limits with GTD Tracks. For one thing, Tracks itself doesn’t really have limits (I guess, theoretically, you could insert so many actions or contexts or projects to break the underlying database, but that would be an insane number). The reason I picked GTD Tracks over the free implementation at tracks.tra.in was that the latter doesn’t implement the deferred start date. I do love my start date.

One thing I did run into is that it’s very bad to use plus + signs in your contexts. I normally have contexts like @online- and @online+ so I can separate my surfing into work and play. However, when I set up the contexts in Tracks with the + sign, all hell broke loose. I ended up having the owner of GTD Tracks, Ryan (great guy, excellent and fast service) go into my database on his server and delete the offending contexts. So, don’t use +’s. Bad.

View by Context

Because Tracks is designed for GTD, it obviously fits very nicely into the philosophy. Your home page will show you all of the Active Contexts. (Contexts, as well as projects, can be either active or hidden.) So, you can see either all of the “important” things, sorted by context on one page, or you can go to a page that just shows one context. That’s great for when you just want to focus on one location, e.g., @online.

Due Date

Although not pure GTD, Tracks does offer a due date. Even better, it will colour code the date by how close it is. Red is overdue, orange is soon (next few days), green is further away.

The only thing it doesn’t offer is a good way to see all dated items on one page. It is possible however, to make use of the text/RSS feature to see a list of all next actions due within the next x days.

When you click on one of the TXT links above, you navigate to a URL, giving you a certain view on your database. You can modify the URL to finetune the info. For instance, if I click on the TXT button for “Actions due in 7 days or earlier”, I get the URL

http://gtdtracks.com/feed/text/……?due=6

I can modify this to http://…due=13 to see those actions due within the next 2 weeks. And that would look like this:

Deferred Start Date

Again, Tracks offers me this functionality. When I say that a next action starts at some later date, Tracks hides it from me, until that date. Well, it hides it from the context views. If I go to a particular project, I can see all of the next actions for that project, even the deferred ones. This is a great idea, because you can do some great project planning this way.

There is no good way to show dependencies between next actions though - hiding NAs only works with the start date.

You can also see all deferred next actions by following the Tickler link, to see something like this:

Now, these were all of my deal-breaker items. Tracks has even more features, that were in my “really really wanted” and “bells & whistles” lists.

Reasonable Price

Well, it’s $1.49 (USD) per month. I’m not a big fan of subscription services, personally, but it seems to be the way of the future. And it’s a small enough amount that I feel good about using the GTD Tracks hosting. You can use Tracks for free, either by using another hosting service like tracks.tra.in, or even by hosting it yourself.

(I’ll let you in on a little secret. One of the reasons I embarked on this whole odyssey to find a new GTD tool was that I fell in love with an offline one that fell into my feed reader one day. But it cost $89 for the good version. That’s way past my sweet spot, so I decided to see if I could find a better app, for a better price. It turns out that I could use GTD Tracks for 59 months (that’s almost 5 years!) before paying as much as this other app would cost. And the odds of me using any app for more than 1 year, let alone 4? Hah!)

Quick Capture

Tracks has *reasonably* quick capture. I have to get to the web page. That’s usually an Alt+Tab (times x) then a Ctrl+0 to get to the first tab in my FireFox. Then I have to get to the first text box to start typing. (There used to be a shortcut key combination to get to the first box, or so I hear, but it’s currently broken.) So, mouse to fist text box. Then I can type type type, tab, type type type, tab, etc. When I’m done, I hit enter (except in the Notes field) to add the item. It’s actually pretty quick. If I could figure out how to use the keyboard (consistently) to get to the Description field, I’d be set.

View Completed

There’s even a page for seeing your completed next actions. Just in case you need to track something down. And, for every project or context view, you can see the last x completed actions (x being set in the preferences).

Staleness

Also in the preferences, you can set how many days should pass before items become stale. I set it at 3 weeks, because I’m slow. At that point, a next action becomes highlighted in yellow. After some other amount of time (can’t tell when), it becomes a darker yellow. I’m not sure if there’s more than two yellows yet.

Projects

Some of the apps I reviewed don’t have the concept of projects. I really want to keep my next actions tied to projects, and Tracks does this in spades. As alluded to earlier, there are views for individual projects, as well as for individual contexts. So, I can go to a particular project view, and see all the next actions, including deferred and done ones. In addition, you can use Tracks to keep notes. So, you can have a descriptor that goes along with each project, and you can create individual notes that are tied to the project as well. I don’t tend to make use of these features, but they are available.

Links in Notes

As you can see from the screenshot above, each next action can have a note. You can use markup in that note in order to do things like embed hyperlinks, create lists. etc. When I was searching the forums, I read that you could either Markdown or Textile to mark up the text. I found that Textile seems to work better. Some of the things I use:

h1. Header 1
h2. Header 2
“link text”:http://gtdwannabe.com
* for unordered list items
# for ordered list items
** or ## for indents
_emph_
*strong*
-deleted-
+inserted+

Portability

GTD Tracks, being an online app, is portable, as long as you’re near a computer with an Internet connection. I’d have to say that this is the greatest downfall. For instance, I’m going to spend about 6 weeks travelling to and fro. There will be Internet at various locations, but not all. And I will have my laptop, but no Internet, means no GTD app for me. Don’t think I haven’t been thinking about it! And there will be a two week period without any Internet at all. Eeek.

Printing

As I discussed earlier, you can see different text/RSS views of your data. I’ve never been a big fan of seeing my next actions as a feed, but I love the text view. Here are some of the ways I can get a text version of my data - suitable for printing:

all (non-deferred) actions
actions due within the next x days
actions completed within the last x days
list of all contexts (and count of actions)
list of all projects (and count of actions)
list of all active projects with no actions (great for weekly review!)
and for every context or project, a list of all the actions for that context/project (not counting deferred)

Things I don’t like about the text output:

No way to see deferred actions. At all.
No way to see the notes associated with individual actions.
No way to see actions associated with a particular tag (see below).

Download/Backup

In addition to being able to print these text feeds, you can make use of some wget magic to get these feeds downloaded to your computer, so you can have a txt backup of (most of) your next actions. See Ryan’s excellent instructions here.

General Commentary

So far, I’ve discussed some pretty specific things. I have a few general likes as well:

I love the way that Tracks treats contexts and projects as equally important dimensions. I can slice and dice my next actions however I want; one dimension is not more important. This is different from, say, Outlook, where there isn’t even the concept of a Project field (at least not without a lot of extra hacking).
I briefly discussed the concept of Active and Hidden. A context or project may be either Active or Hidden. A project may also be Completed. Hidden contexts don’t show up on the Home page, so this is a great way of hiding contexts like @waiting and @someday. Items in hidden projects will actually show up on the home page, but the division for projects seems to be more for review purposes. For instance, you can see a list of all active projects that don’t have any next actions assigned. That tells you that you’re missing something. Once a project is closed, it’s completely hidden from view, unless you navigate to the Projects page and look for it there.
I love the header. It actually moves down the page with you, which can be a bit disconcerting. In addition, the number in red shows you how many actions you have listed on whatever page you’re viewing.

Minor Flaws

No app can be perfect, especially when you ask for so much. Here are some of the things missing (in addition to whatever comments I’ve made above) from Tracks:

There is no real synchronization with Palm. Me, I download the txt file showing all of my undeferred NAs, and sync that to my Palm with DocumentsToGo. Not elegant, but it’s at least something to look at.
There are no reminders or alarms. That’s okay, I don’t really need them anyway.
There is no calendar. But that’s okay, I’m still enamoured of my remind text based calendar.
There is no concept of a timer for tasks. Again, okay; I tend to time by whether or not I’m working, not exactly what I’m working on.
Besides the ability to see a list of your completed actions, there’s no concept of reports, e.g., the average length of time it takes to complete next actions, etc. But again, that’s just a frilly bell. Or is it a whistle?
There is no way to get a text feed of the next actions associated with a particular tag. You can see a text feed for any context or project, but not a tag.
There’s not really any concept of archiving. You mark a next action as done, it gets pushed to the “Completed actions” list on whatever page you’re on. However, if you decide you want to clean up your database by, say, deleting closed projects, you end up losing everything. I’d rather have some kind of archive capability, where I could shove things to keep a clean main database.
The GTD Tracks implementation has the ability to do auto-complete in the context and project text fields. Normally, this is great. However, it sometimes seems to not stick, and I’ll end up with a bunch of next actions in the wrong context. Or, I type to fast, and confuse it. Basically, it just means that I type really slow in those two fields, to make sure I get the right context and project.

Conclusion

Well, I think I’ve thoroughly flogged this horse. This is my reasonably complete review of Tracks, specifically the GTD Tracks implementation of it. If you’re in the market for a good-looking, very flexible, online GTD application, check out Tracks. GTD Tracks offers a free trial so you can get your feet wet. Tracks.tra.in offers another hosted implementation, missing the deferred start date. Or, you could be brave and install it yourself. Good luck!