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Jordan Munch O'Hare edited this page Dec 14, 2022 · 15 revisions

This page contains a collection of tips and tricks to speed up your work with Tracks and to structure your work with Tracks.

Speeding things up

Learn the access keys

Many views have access keys. This speeds up navigating and saves time.

Use the template scripts in the /doc directory

You often have recurring projects which follow specific structure (e.g., travel, filing taxes). Note that these are not recurring actions. For recurring projects there is a template script in /doc which permits easily instantiating

Use the action drag&drop to quickly define dependencies

Each action has a little grab-able bar between the description and the quick menu. The mouse pointer forms a hand over it. Use this to drag&drop the action onto other actions to define a dependency.

Keyboard-driven project selection

In Google Chrome, you can quickly access a project through the following key combo. Depending on your operating system, your access keys might start differently than Alt, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Alt-P Ctrl-F <search string> Esc Return

Retrieve your task list through a Jabber-compatible client

Add [email protected] as a contact and use the gtd command to set your feed URL. Once its set up, you can retrieve your task list by simply typing gtd without a URL.

Structuring things

Getting an Inbox

Many other software packages support an inbox. You can achieve the same in TRACKS by defining a project called @Inbox and a context called @nocontext. You can set this context to be the default context in the preferences. Now, if you don't immediately want to define a project, just specify the project to be @Inbox and the context to be nocontext. You can then later review the inbox and go through the created tasks.

Hide completed actions in the overview

To hide completed actions just go to the preferences and set the number of shown completed actions to zero.

Hide projects you can't work on in the near future

You often will have projects that you cannot work on or that depend on some external event to happen. Just hide them, so they don't clutter the home screen.

Use only lower-case for everything

You will often type things quickly and then the autocomplete will be unable to keep up with you. This can cause you to accidentally create new projects like one for misc although you wanted it in the project Misc.

Application-like feeling in Google Chrome

To get an application-like feeling with tracks, start it in Google Chrome with --app= like

google-chrome --app=http://localhost:3000

Things to do with tags

Tracks users apply tags in the following ways: (add your own)

  • Add people's names to tasks so when you see them you can easily see what tasks depend on them by clicking on the tag. This is a mix of a context and a quick search thingy.
  • Add approximate activity durations as tags:
    • Short for less than 5min, medium for 20-30min block, and long for a 1 hour undisturbed bock.
    • 10 for 10min, 20 for 20min, 30 for 30min, ...

Tracks Quirks

Can't get your links to work in the notes page

Tracks currently filters the notes field for links and has three scenarios where it will show the link: either a regular href link, or an identifier for onenote (onenote://MYNOTE) or obsidian (obsidian://MYNOTE) . Otherwise, Tracks will just convert it into text in the notes field.

Debugging

Apache tips

MySQL tips

log files locations

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