A blog about the many neat things in life, along with the many other things that are lying around. Categories include: political things, philosophy things, design things, template things, garage things, music things, and lots and lots of other things!

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Keeping on Task with Tracks

So, I finally found it: my dream todo list manager. Tracks is a Ruby on Rails implementation of David Allen's Getting Things Done task management methodology. Though not sung in hymns like it was a year or two ago, GTD is still a highly practical way of organizing upcoming tasks by next actions.

There are a couple reasons to love Tracks. First off, it's open source, so you can set it up on your own server. I don't have to worry about the company's revenue model and sustainability factor when I set it up - as long as I have web space, it's there. Second, it has a very useful home page, with links to all your current next actions, sorted by context, and a handy-dandy AJAX action form. Quick and simple addition and completion of items make it a breeze to keep your system up to date.

Finally, the one feature I've wanted forever in a todo list app - it archives completed items and puts them out of the way. This way, even if my todo list isn't shrinking, I can tell I am actually accomplishing things. And I can look back and see when and how I was accomplishing things - very handy when I consider changes like cutting caffeine or exercising more.

If you've set up a RoR application before, Tracks is a pretty quick install, but I will warn folks that Ruby applications are more complicated to setup than simple PHP stuff. Once I got mine setup on Dreamhost, however, I've been tasking away for three weeks now. And I don't see myself turning back any time soon.

Now if only it would sync to my palm or ical...

Labels: , , ,

2 Comments:

Blogger lukemelia said...

Hi Agius,

Thanks for the writeup. Glad you like Tracks. If you have ideas for new features or improvements, let us know!

Cheers from NYC,
Luke
(Tracks committer)

7/05/2007  
Blogger Zhan said...

Sounds great! I was of course totally confused by the lingo, but I can see it is really working for you.
Way to go,
Zhans

7/07/2007  

Post a Comment

<< Home