Skip to content

GTD on Tracks

Jump to bottom Edit New page
Elias Holzmann edited this page Jul 27, 2024 · 6 revisions

Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen is a personal time management method to organize and manage all the things to do in your private and professional life. GTD could be implemented with a pen, paper and folders, but using a tool like Tracks automates many tedious tasks and is very recommended.

This tutorial gives a short overview of core concepts of GTD and how they relate to Tracks. A great resource to learn more about GTD is GTD for Hackers.

Core Concepts

In GTD "ToDo items" are called Actions. Every action that comes up and takes less than 2 minutes to resolve should be dealt with right away. If it requires more work, write it down to get it out of your head.

Actions should have a clear wording that is actionable! Write it down in a way that you really know what the first step to start would be.

Order pirate puzzle for Grandma online

is much clearer than

Grandma present

If you don't know what to buy for your Grandma, you could write a "meta" action like

Think about presents for Grandma

When writing down actions, they should get a Context. The context defines where you can actually execute the action. Common examples are:

  • @Computer
  • @Home
  • @Car

If you expect to order Grandmas pirate puzzle online, put it into the @Computer context.

You may be responsible for an action that other people have to execute. In this case you can put them in a "Waiting for" Context once the task has been handed off to the other party. An example could be:

Plumber came by and fixed the pipes

Actions can have due dates. You may want to get the birthday present in time, so make sure to define the due date accordingly. Additionally, actions can have "Show from" dates. Set a "Show from" date if you know that you can't or don't want/need to deal with it until a certain day. Deferring actions to another day removes them from your current list of actions until the specified day. You can see deferred actions in the Tickler view.

If something requires multiple actions, put them into a Project. When defining the project itself requires work already, you could create a "plan project XYZ" action.

The idea behind all of this business is to reduce the mental overhead. Writing it down gets it out and writing it down in an actionable way reduces the effort to get to it later. Contexts and dates allow you to hide all the things you cannot deal with right now. It decouples "planning time" (defining actions) from "doing time" (checking off actions).

Review

A key factor for this to work is that you personally trust your system! This is also why it is good to have one system for work and private matters. To make sure that the system ages well, you should plan regular Reviews.

During a review, make sure that all actions are actionable and still relevant. Throw out unnecessary, completed or duplicate actions. You are likely to take on more work than you can actually get done, so this clean up process really helps to commit to either doing something or not.

Daily review:

  • Go through visible actions and defer everything that is not relevant today
  • Check that really important actions are listed

Weekly review:

  • Cleanup of actions, projects and contexts
  • Get an overview of what you committed to
  • Think about what became irrelevant
  • Make sure everything in your head is also reflected in Tracks

First Setup

It is worth to take a weekend and gather everything that you consider "something I need to do". Once you've identified all the things, even those you wont get into for the next 3 years, put them in your system. This doesn't only apply to Tracks or GTD in general, but every personal time management system, since this allows you to stop thinking about these ”other things to do” and concentrate on the matter at hand.

Tips & Tricks

  • Use repeating actions to schedule a weekly review
    • e.g. every Friday
  • Use repeating actions to establish (daily) habits
    • Habits are ideally connected to some other regular behavior, e.g. "Take a run after getting up"
  • Use multiple projects for long term planning, e.g.
    • "Long Term Goal: PhD 2020" to keep track of generic things for that project
    • "PhD: Write Thesis" for everything you have to do to deal with the thesis
    • "PhD: ..."

Relation to Other Methods

Orthogonal methods:

Where Tracks & GTD Does Not Help

  • Not a good calendar
  • Bad for things that should happen multiple times per day
  • Not for note taking (other than notes belonging to Actions)
Add a custom footer
Clone this wiki locally