Hi!

First of all I have a confession to make. after a half year of using tracks, i thought it’s time for a change. so i reviewed about 15 GTD applications in the last days. in the end it turned out, that no other solution covers that much of my needs (and i’m quite greedy, when it comes to that ^^).
So I decided to stay loyal and ask you (forum readers and especially the development team), what you think about my way of handling Tracks.

Here is how I use Tracks in everyday life:
When I start a new project, i first collect all actions that may occur even if some of them are intersecting some others. e.g. When planning a Halloween party, i add “find dj”, “get drinks”, get band”, ...
Later it turns out, that all good bands are already booked up for that date.

And here comes a little dilemma. I don’t want to delete the action “get band”, because, if I plan a hw-party next year, i will review that project and i really don’t want to forget about a band.
On the other hand I don’t want to mark it as “done”, since this distorts my statistics
Currently I add a tag “dropped” to that action and check it as complete.
Therefore: What do you think about a native “dropped” state for actions? Maybe with an own section similar to the “Completed Actions” and related statistics.

Back to my usage story:
I’m really looking forward to the gCal integration in the upcoming version. Currently I have to add an appointment manually for each action with a due date. This easily gets inconsistent, as you can guess.
Am I right, that using this feed will add actions with a due date as an “all day” event to the calendar?
Or (may I dream) will it also be possible to set a due time and duration in the “New Action” form?

After a hard week of GTDing I review my achievements in several ways. I write a blog which documents my personal impressions and I also collect some sort of “checklists” in a wiki. So I know what is necessary and what is a waste of time, when doing a similar project.
Up to now it’s mainly copy&paste;of the completed actions. It would be great to automate this via a feed. I’ve already found some helpful parameters in the feed links, but none to show only “done” actions.
Also I didn’t find a way to build a feed for a specific tag.
Since there will be a “starred actions” feed in the upcoming version, will there also be a way to build your own feed url for a given task?

I hope you don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking you to implement these ideas. I’m mainly interested in your opinion about them.

best regards,
Amarillo

I like your dropped dilemma wrt statistics. I have a similar dilemma for actions I forgot to add to tracks but that I did do. They don’t show up in my stats

I think it would be good to add the dropped state as an enhancement request to Trac (on dev.rousette.org.uk) so we can remember it for a future version. I understand your use case to keep it for future reuse / referece, but remember that tracks is not a tool for project planning or advanced note-taking, but for maintaining a next-action-list. Deleting the dropped todo fits this better… You can also consider adding these todos in a note to the project…

In the dev tree, the calendar feed puts actions as an all-day-event on the due date. There is no support for due time / duration

I agree that the done view could be improved. There are some improvement requests in Trac, but you can see if you can add your thoughts there.

I think part of your issue is that a task like “Get band” is not very specific or achievable at the time you go to accomplish it.  Maybe try “Create shortlist of available bands” or “Create shortlist of 3 available bands”.  These can be followed up by “Book Gwar for halloween party” if they’re available.  The shortlist task can even be marked as done when you have a shortlist of zero or you have 3 bands available but not good enough.

@reinier:
i’ll create a ticket for the dropped-thing. Would be nice to see that feature one day

I don’t use Tracks for project management. but i also don’t use it as a list of “3 word actions”.
For projects there are better software solutions and for short tasks, a pen and paper solution like hipster-PDA is fully sufficient.
I think Tracks lies somewhere in between, since it is too mighty for the one, and just not intended to be the other.

the “get band” action is a good example to describe how i use tracks:
as daijoubu said, the action is too abstract and unspecific for real GTD, but that’s my intention. if i would write down every little action, I’d spend more time administering them, than actually working on them.
Therefore I use unspecific action names and add only important working steps and changes to the description.

But I don’t want to misuse it as an “advanced note taking system” either. That is why i export my experiences to a wiki.

I hope you won’t stone me for that ^^

The nice thing about tracks is that is does not dictate a workflow. So everybody uses it as they see fit.

I think that reviewing past projects is a good thing for tracks to support (why else to keep history?) and our current done view is not sufficient for that. So if we improve that, supporting droped todos besides deleted todos could be very interesting too.