How do people do this right now? Surely you don’t create a project, list 20 steps, and then have them all show up on your front page right? I’ve read that you can star the next actions of every project, and then use that, but it’s a horrible way of doing things. Completing an action doesn’t unstar it, nor does it star the next action.

I’m really liking Tracks, it’s *almost* everything that I was looking for in a GTD app, but this is the dealbreaker.

If I read your post correctly, I think you use Tracks to plan a whole project? So you’re adding a project and add all actions you can think off, right?

Tracks is not a tool for planning projects, Tracks is a tool to keep track of your _next_ actions in the spirit of GTD. So, instead of adding all relevant actions to a project, only add those actions that you need to do to take the project one step further. This will probably reduce the number of actions per project to 2 or 3.

OTOH, dependencies could be usefull, for example to be able to manage actions that depend on a waiting-for-action. There is an enhancement request in Trac (http://dev.rousette.org.uk) for it.

Reinier, I think this is a very important option to have. I need a system I can ‘empty my brain’ into. Every time I think of something I need a place to put it. I don’t want to write out all the steps of a project I think about, then type them in AGAIN every time I complete one and a new action item comes up. I want to constantly be adding things to the system, and only see them when they can be acted on. Action item dependencies are the only way to do this. Anything less just makes me deal with the same action item more then once, which wastes time. The flexibility of action item dependencies will add a lot of usefulness to Tracks.

Oh, I’m not arguing against action dependencies, just pointing out that it is not really GTD

Again, dependencies are on the wish list. One developer is even planning on tackling it someday, but no code yet…

Perhaps using a tag “Next Action”. Then in the Home Page you can click on the tag “Next Action” and only the next actions of all contexts will be visible.

This has the advantage over the usual sequential dependent projects that it allows to have more than one next action on a project at a given time.

Any time you do the tagged next actions on a project you have to look manually for what actions come next to tag them though.

you can also use the starring feature for that

I think like the original poster does, dump all the steps in and then pick them off along the way.  To keep them in one place, then add them onesy and twosy to Tracks would be silly in my case as well.  In Tracks, you work around this by setting the “Show From Date” to something way in the future on a whole bunch of tasks.  Thus it sits on the “Deferred actions in this project” list and when you want it, erase the “Show From” date.  A little cluncky, but it would work.

FYI: I started a wiki page http://www.getontracks.org/wiki/ActionDependencies which is intended to outline a way to implement the dependencies function.

In summary:
1. The Add action form is updated with a “predecessor” drop down list.
2. An action is only displayed as an active action if it does not have any uncompleted predecessors.
3. Deferred actions in project pages and the tickler contains the “blocked actions”.
4. Links to predecessors/successors are displayed with the action.

Please feel free to comment and/or change the page if you feel that this is a viable way for adding dependencies.

There are a number of tickets that are related to action dependencies. I’d like to use https://www.assembla.com/spaces/tracks-tickets/tickets/300 to track progress on this and invalidate or associate other closely related tickets.

What do you think?

I have added my comments. I hope more will join. Will you cross-post to the mailing list?

I was not aware of the list until now. I’ll join it!

For those who aren’t reading the mailing list, I am cross posting my progress report here:

I started a fork on http://wiki.github.com/bohrax/tracks. Perhaps I
should have branched the code also? Being a complete newbie to git,
Ruby and Rails I’d appreciate any feedback and tips on best practices
here.

Anyway, the code, while still being in an early stage and practically
devoid of error checking now supports the basics for
creating/editing/viewing dependencies as described in #300 and #903.

If someone would have time to try the code out, or dig into it, it
would be really great. Any feedback appreciated!

BR
/Henrik

Henrik that looks great!
Keep up the great work!

I’m a noob, but if there’s anything I can do let me know.

Thanks touficjohn!

To make it easier to give feedback, I deployed the demo at http://tracks-deps.heroku.com. (Thanks Gavin for the howto).

Please note that this is at the prototype stage, and for now my main goal is to integrate it with the Tracks/GTD work flow and GUI look and feel, but any feedback is highly appreciated.

Login with tester/tester and have fun with it!

Henrik - that looks brilliant!

I had a quick go and spotted what looks like a bug. If I click on “edit” on a task which has subordinates, then save the edit - the list of subordinates won’t show up any more (unless I refresh the browser page).

Looking forward to seeing my task list in it

Thanks Orlando,

Glad you like the demo. There are a lot work to be done yet, e.g. Javascript updates that you mention. Not sure if you’ve tried adding successor actions by drag and drop. It should work, but also requires manual refreshing for now.

Request for help:
1. There seem to be a Z-order problem with the drop down menus when using DnD. Does anyone know how to fix this?
2. The “Remove successor” icon is only a mockup for now. Can someone write code for this using the same methodology as for starring actions etc? Haven’t been able to penetrate the ujs library.
3. It would be great if someone had time to look at and comment the code at http://github.com/bohrax/tracks/tree/master.