Greetings,

I’m rather new to GTD (am reading the book), but love the potential along with Tracks, which I’ve installed on my home server.

I was wondering what the best practices are for handling both Tracks and Email simultaneously?

I conduct quite a bit of business through email and am trying to figure out an efficient way of using email and Tracks to keep track of projects, NAs, etc.

For one instance, let’s say I have a variety of important emails to respond to that require time to think—should I put this down in Tracks as an NA or should I set up a GTD system in email (Thunderbird) to handle the email stuff?  Or is that redundant?  Etc?

Has anyone figured out a way of using both as seamlessly as possible?

Thanks!
Ray

Disclaimer:  I’m brand new to the form and fairly new to Tracks.  However, I’m not all that new to GTD, so the rest shouldn’t matter for this question.

Frankly, I think having multiple systems is too much hassle.  I tried GTDGmail—and understand, I’m a big fan of Gmail itself—and it just didn’t work out for me.  It was too easy to hide things from myself.  Indeed, what I’ve come quickly to dig about Tracks is that it puts everything in front of me at once—reviewing is as hard as scrolling down, at most.

As for how I handle email, since I don’t use it for my GTD system—the answer is, really, the same way I handle any other input.  Can I deal with it under 2 minutes?  (I’d say my cutoff is longer than 2 minutes in practice, but anyway.)  If so, I deal with it and archive it.  If not, yes, absolutely, an NA goes into Tracks for it.  And I still archive it.  (And, by the way, if dealing with it means delegating it, I add an NA into my Waiting context in Tracks.  I kind of wish “waiting” items had a separately life in tracks, but really, this works okay.  And, say it with me, I still archive the message.)  The end result is what I have now: an empty inbox.

This isn’t a sign I don’t get much email.  I’m a system administrator for a couple of thousand users.  I get email.  I just apply GTD principles to it: Is it garbage?  I delete it.  Is it reference?  I archive it.  (If it’s something specific to an existing action or project, I may copy data from it into a note in Tracks.  I also often record the date of a relevant message, particularly in something that’s been delegated.  But I digress.)  Is it a new project?  I start a project for it.  Is it quick?  I handle it now.  Will it take longer?  I make an action for it.  So on and so forth.  But one way or another, it’s leaving my inbox because my inbox is an input, not a system.  Tracks is my system now.

But, as they say, your mileage may vary.  I will say that the Zero Inbox methodology is one strongly recommended by folks like Merlin Mann and, well, David Allen, and I find that it’s a good one for me.

Solari: I think my method is more or less like rfrancis’s (welcome both, by the way!). I’ve thought at various time about integrating email into Tracks, but in the sense of piping info from one to the other. Both need to be good at their own focussed tasks, rather than poor Jacks-of-all-trades. But the problem is that users’ set ups vary enormously, so it’s hard to get something that would work on all installations.

However, there are scripts around that will help you send data from email to Tracks, so they might suit you (a couple are mentioned in this forum).

Sorry, I meant to post the URLS:

http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/forums/viewthread/75/

http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/forums/viewthread/114/

I’m still looking for a good way to use email and tracks together. My workflow is rather the same as rfrancis describes. I also use the notes field to jot down the reference to the email by copy-and-pasting the contents or adding a reference to the email folder where I stored the email which is part of the context for the task.

For delegated emails I use bcc to send the email to a script which adds it to tracks (see first link of bsag). The content of the email is stored in the notes field.

I notice that when I want to follow-up on an email I need the original email. That is difficult without a form of integration. The approach of aathanor (second link in post of bsag) could work for that though.

(An approach for Tracks could be the integration of IMAP. IMAP allows moving email to folder, storing references in Tracks and retrieving the email…)

Currently still a lot of handwork to integrate email and tracks…