My first implementation of Getting Things Done used notecards and yahoo calendar. Nothing else. I had to change buildings a lot at my last job, and paper was the only thing that could accomodate this.

As so often happens to us in the Computing sector, a better job opportunity came up, so I’m at a new position. Where I am now, I can rely on always having at least one computer around at all times, they’re even used in meetings sometimes.

This being said, I’ve switched to Tracks. It is almost perfect.

I’ve implemented “WaitingFor” as a context, and I use a context “NotYetANextAction” for things that will be an NA in the future, but aren’t doable yet (I hide this context). This is also how I will tickle things when I can trust them that much.

Here are the “last mile” things that would make tracks perfect:

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1> I have over 300 Someday/Maybes (Still in a text file, awaiting import). Projects for me flow in and out of someday maybe’s. While “WaitingFor” is a context, Someday/Maybe is a project state or “Category”, like ACTIVE or COMPLETED.

It would be most useful to have and be able to add user definied “categories” like ACTiVE and COMPLETED. If someday/maybe could be added as a “category” we’d be able to use that, and it could be hidden most of the time, then a person could make it visible during a review, then hide it again when done with the review. Straight dropdown categories like Context’s are for NA’s right now would be very useful, and from the outside a simple implementation step.

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2> A button to alphabetize things on a page? You have all these draggable lists. It seems like a “Sort by alpha” and “Sort by # Actions” would both be easy and very useful. The buttons only need to be on the page that currently has the “Drag” handles, eg, Contexts for contexts, projects for projects.

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3> Email warning on due tasks. This is the feature that would make Tracks very trustworthy Right now, I’m sure I’m going to use tracks for everything. I’m not sure I’m going to always be able to trust it to do my time sensitive things. I check my email about 10 times a day. Tracks, <2. If I knew I could get an email when something truly urgent was coming due, I would be able to put anything in tracks.

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Out of the above list, if bsag isn’t interested in implementing them, I’d be willing to do so if she’d review and take the patches into the trunk if they work how she likes them (she can have copyright on them, I don’t care). #1 and #2 are the big features for me, #3 isn’t as easy as 1 or 2, nor am I up to coding it, (verifying mail libraries is a PITA in my experience).

—Michael

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The one thing I’d find most useful: A way to indicate the “nextness” of actions. When I had written my own GTD widget (a now-defunct MediaWiki plugin), I wanted a way to have only next actions show up – and not the other actions for the project. But I also wanted to be able to enter all the actions I could predict for a project, rather than store them somewhere else. Thus, every action was flag as having or not having the “next” nature.

Better still (but far more complex, programming-wise) would be action dependencies – for example, to be able to set up an action to automatically become a next action upon completion of an existing next action. Maybe for 2.0?

My time doesn’t free up for another month or so, but at that point, maybe I’ll try to implement these myself. If there’s interest, I can submit/post patches.

– Brad

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As someone who started contributing to Tracks by posting patches to the Trac and is now an active committer, I can say for sure that bsag is very receptive and encouraging of contributions, and is a joy to collaborate with. Help us make Tracks the best tool it can be! -LukeMelia