Brand new to GTD and Tracks. Trying to get all my projects and NAs into Tracks. I’m just a little confused about something which could be just that I’m not understanding GTD 100%.

After some brainstorming, I’ve got 4 pieces of lined paper full of projects/actions. I started entering all my projects but I’m thinking that I should be able to put projects into some sort of context. As an example, I could have projects like “Learn Spanish” or “Climb Mount Everest” which I consider more of a “Someday/Maybe” project. But right below it I’ll have items mixed in such as “Oil change for car” and “Get gift for wife”.

Yes, I want to review the “Someday/Maybe” items each week but I’d like to be able to take a quick look over all my projects and be easily separate all my work related projects from my home and Someday/Maybe, etc.

What I started to do was enter projects like “SM-Climb Mount Everest” “HOME-Oil Change for Car” “WORK-Get a pay raise”, etc.

Am I missing something here? Any suggestions?

I can see the power of having all my NAs divided by Context (@Phone, @Home, etc).

Thanks

I’m running into the same issue. I’m not sure what the best way to resolve it is yet. I like the simplicity of the UI that comes from 1 level of projects, but I feel the same way as you about my project list.

Ideas welcome!

My feeling is that tagging might be the way to go with this. For one thing, people don’t have to use tags if they don’t want to, so it won’t get in the way, and it’s flexible, so people could use it to separate out work/home things, simulate hierarchical projects, flag things urgent or important if they so wish, or ‘star’ actions to work on today.

What I’m not sure of is whether tags should be applied to projects or to actions themselves: for some of the purposes I outlined above, it would make sense for projects to be tagged, but for others, it would be better if actions were tagged.

What do people think?

Tagging might be a good way to handle this.

I’ve been fighting with this as well - and I am just getting started with GTD, too.  I have some contexts that are like “@call”, and “@e-mail” - but I’ve been having a hard time dealing with if it’s a personal thing or a work thing.

Tags might be helpful, in handling this. 

I’d say that being able to tag at BOTH the project level and action level would be good.  There are a lot of things I don’t assign to projects, so tagging at that level would be ideal.  Perhaps having an option on a project to tag all actions as [x] would be good?  That way, the user wouldn’t have to add in a certain tag for all steps in a project manually…

-b

I’m using Tracks since a couple of weeks ago and I find it bright. On the context for projects issue:
1. Part of the problem here is that “Someday/Maybe” it is not a real context. In fact any action under this context can be placed under any other context, and it is more about a priority mechanism than a context in itself. (The same is true about “Inbox”, which many of us use to collect stuff into. Only that in Inbox case the stuff in there is *allways* going quickly in the proper context, while “Someday/Maybe” is more of an outbox, where things collect and stay lost in space)
2. Projects in itself do not need a context, mainly because GTD’s power reside in the focus on the next concrete action in the right context, not on the “abstract” project. Adding context to projects will cascade into a number of other complications, making Tracks losing its simplicity
3. “Climb mount Everest” is not the only thing it should get into Tracks, if I understand GTD well. Once the project defined, one should write down the first concrete action which is part of the project, like “Buy Everest map” and place it in the right context, like “@errands”

So:
1. Maybe Tracks will need one day some type of “virtual folders”, as defined by GTD: Inbox, Action, Someday, Reference, etc. Everything collected will go to inbox, everything is now in Tracks will be basicaly in Action, other stuff will propewrly go into Reference or Someday.
2. Adding context to projects sounds to me like a bad idea
3. Tags may be useful, but they have nothing to do with the problem here. What jholbrook is describing has to do more with GTD usage than Tracks. But anything complicating the system should be carefully weighted in.

cheers

aathanor - 09 January 2007 07:17 AM

1. Part of the problem here is that “Someday/Maybe” it is not a real context. In fact any action under this context can be placed under any other context, and it is more about a priority mechanism than a context in itself. (The same is true about “Inbox”, which many of us use to collect stuff into. Only that in Inbox case the stuff in there is *allways* going quickly in the proper context, while “Someday/Maybe” is more of an outbox, where things collect and stay lost in space)

I have this same issue with my “WAITING” context.  Except, is it really a problem?  When you’re waiting on something, it really doesn’t have another context, because there’s nothing to be done.  Likewise, your Inbox example—those things don’t have contexts because they haven’t gotten there yet.  I’m iffy about the Someday/Maybe—indeed, I don’t store those in Tracks at all, myself.  My point is that it’s not immediately clear to me that there’s a problem at all.

Anyway, I agree that projects don’t have contexts.  Actions have contexts.  Projects have actions.

I really like the concept of having virtual folders, i.e. an inbox where everything that needs to be processed goes into. Right now, on the “Home” page of Tracks, you see next actions broken down by context. I’d like the option to have a pure inbox where all my next actions are listed without being boxed in by context boxes. Just like how one puts stuff in a physical inbox and then processes through the entire inbox as needed.

Perhaps the way to do this is make the “real” inbox the home page on Tracks and change the Contexts tab to show actions within each context as well as a list of contexts at the top or to the side?

Ray

Solari: I’m not quite sure what you mean by an inbox here: I’ve usually taken this to mean unprocessed actions, i.e. those that you haven’t assigned to contexts/projects yet.

But I do see the point of seeing all your actions listed. To avoid unnecessary complication and keep flexibility, I had decided (at some point in the future) to add a ‘sort’ page where you see a kind of table view of all the actions, with columns for context, project, due date etc. You could then sort on any of the columns to give a fully flexible view. Would that help?

That would help!  Much appreciated…

Ray

I’m currently looking at both Tracks and GTD-PHP for my GTD solution and one of the things GTD-PHP did to solve this is by allowing Projects to have a “Category”. This allows you to have “Work” and “School” and “Home” projects easily separated. It would work alot like contexts but give a separate list that isn’t tool or place related.

I would see the display working alot like contexts do for Actions but I wouldn’t require a Project to have a Category or at least allow for a default of “None”.

Thanks