We live in an increasingly busy world. There is always something asking for our attention, so how do we get the most important things done first? David Allen has tried to answer this with his Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity methodology. One of the myriad of applications that support Allen’s trusted system is Tracks.
Tracks is an open source web based application that is written in Ruby on Rails for managing tasks and projects. It can be run on a variety of platforms:
- Windows
- Mac
- Linux
- personal web servers/hosts
- Amazon EC2 instances
- web service providers (Tracks Train, GTDTracks, GTDify)
- Virtual appliances (VMware, Parallels, Hyper-V, VirtualBox)
- Bootable cd (ISO) images
Tracks users are a niche market. You need to follow GTD to use it. However, once you start using it, it is likely that you will use it to capture all the information in your life, for your entire life. This makes it an attractive service to offer if you are a web service provider.
The fact that Tracks is open source means that users can contribute code back to the project. This is an important tool for a small development team as it can turn your users into developers for little expense.
Because on its small size, Tracks uses tools to leverage the wisdom of crowds to improve the project as a whole:
- Blog – for news and updates.
- Wiki – for general documentation and to supplement the manual.
- Forum – for help from the Tracks community.
- Github – for developers to keep and track changes to source code.
Being able to be downloaded saves the developers from having to box and distribute the software. Tracks also has a dedicated mobile style sheet to format the website so it displays properly on mobile browsers. The community has also written an iPhone app (iTracks) that can access to do lists on the iPhone. Other apps have also been written for Outlook and other software.
Want to learn more? Try these other sites about Tracks:
Ramp Up #6: Tracks for GTD from Sean Tierney on Vimeo.
Google Tech Talk by David Allen on GTD
Tracks from a developers viewpoint
An indepth look at some of Tracks features
Tracks from the GTD perspective
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Looks great, I’ve been meaning to read GTD (have a copy but haven’t had time to read it, which is ironic).
Does Tracks offer any hosted service? or is it just a download and host yourself? Perhaps they could make money by having a pay-per-month hosted version?
I can relate to the irony of not reading GTD
Tracks Train (https://tracks.tra.in/) is a free hosted service that I tried for a little while. There are commercial sites too. Personally I’d prefer to have a little more control over my data and went the self hosted option. If you don’t have hosting I’d recommend Turnkey Linux’s Virtual Machine. Its perfect for running at home:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/tracks