tracks.tra.in is a hosted version of BSAG's Tracks, a GPL web todo-list based on David Allen's Getting Things Done time-management methodology. the service is offered free by tra.in to help you manage your time!

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a time-management method relying on the idea that you need to clear all your "To Do" tasks out of your mind and record them somewhere, using any system you like — e.g. a notebook, a voice recorder, or even tracks.tra.in.

this act of brain-dumping and organizing your tasks relieves stress and frees you to concentrate on gettin' all them actions done. collecting "next actions" rather than vague task goals front-loads planning and makes it easy to jump in and complete an action.

the GTD Wikipedia entry provides a good, quick overview providing pretty much everything you need to know about GTD to use this site. you could also buy the Getting Things Done book or borrow it from a friend. or just read the glossary below and jump in!

go to the signup page. if you just want a peek, try logging in with user gwbush, any password.

• contexts: use contexts to categorize your different modes of activity, e.g. "Home", "Work", "Phone", "Errands", etc. context schemes are fairly personal: for some examples, see 43Folder's Merlin on his contexts and this thread collecting people's contexts.

• projects: fairly self-explanatory — anything you have to do that will require more than a couple actions. when you finish, a project can be "completed." a project's actions may span different contexts.

• next actions: the idea here is to be fairly specific about the next action for a project, thus doing your planning in advance. once organized by context and project, you can drill through the actions that need to get done.

• notes: you can add notes to collect your thoughts on a specific project. notes may be formatted in Textile or Markdown.

yes, recently GTD has become fairly popular among tech types, especially via blogs such as 43 Folders and Lifehack. its adherents extol GTD's tool-agnostic simplicity, and write extensively on tweaking their own highly-personal GTD "implementations". Here are some links to get you started.

• 43 Folders: Getting Started with GTD
• Wired article, A New Cult for the Info Age
• del.icio.us bookmarks tagged "gtd"
• technorati blog entries tagged "gtd"
• blogger Matt detailing his GTD scheme
• Hawk Wings: Ten Mac Tools for GTD

yeah, totally! check out the Tracks site for download and installation instructions. though using tracks.tra.in is way easier and lets you access your todos from anywhere.

sure, you can download your data in YAML, XML, or CSV format from the Tracks 1.5 Export data page.

Tracks is developed by the pseudonymous "BSAG" and several other open-source collaborators. i'm a grad student named chris; you can see more of my projects at dearinter.net and tra.in.

Right away, let me assure you that tracks.tra.in (and the rest of the tra.in family) is in no danger, economic or otherwise, of going offline. We run high-traffic sites and are really against downtime. Since 2007 we've been using Slicehost and have been really happy about it (as were the users who emailed, thanks)! tracks.tra.in runs on a superfast 2GB slice, with a separate MySQL slice. (If you want to host Tracks for yourself and would rather administer your own server, we recommend Slicehost; please mention train@tra.in or use this link if you'd like us to earn a commission.)

This site is hosted as a micropayment-supported free service,. I've made some small tweaks to Tracks, and provide addresses for todos by email/SMS, but nothing worth a mandatory fee. Google ads won't work for tracks.tra.in, since that would mean giving Google a look at your personal data to get keywords. We hope to use Paypal's micropayment rate to scale: even if only a fraction of users buy a $0.75 microsubscription (and receive DB priority, perhaps) the site could pay to grow on demand.

I promise not to sell your data to anyone, and to respect your privacy. I do not perform data-mining or any other creepy activities on your data. These issues are very important to me: I research privacy-enhancing networks, and once administered my school's Tor server.

yes! please sign up here to generate an email address for your account. it works like this:

• you send an email or SMS to your super-secret e-mail address (e.g., new-car32ink@tra.in.)

• use this message syntax: "action [@context] [!project]". specifying a context or project is optional, and the order doesn't matter — but they need to come at the end of your message. for example, sending:

  file TPS reports @office !y2k upgrading
  would add the item "file TPS reports" to your office context and Y2K upgrade project.

  buy milk @errands
  adds "buy milk" to your errands context, with no project.

  buy milk
  adds "buy milk" to your first context, with no project.

• don't worry about typos! Levenshtein edit distance will match your input to the nearest project and/or context, so you don't have to worry about how exactly your projects are spelled (in the first example, the project actually might have been called "Y2K upgrade").

• adding notes: sending a new action from your email client or BlackBerry and have more to say? use the above syntax in the Subject: line, and jot down the rest of your notes in the message's body. they will be added to the "notes" for that action.

• worried about spam? if you have reason to believe your super-secret email address has fallen into the wrong hands, just cast it off and generate a new one.

please email me with bugs, comments, suggestions.

it's easy! just head over to your feeds page and pick out a TXT feed, which provides a nicely-formatted ASCII list of your todos. you can display this URL from the command line with curl, which is most likely already installed on your Mac or Linux system.

just have curl grab your feed URL like so, replacing this URL with yours here:

curl -m 2 'http://tracks.tra.in/todos.txt?token=9f97d131&due=0'

(the -m 2 indicates curl should spend no longer than 2 seconds overall trying to talk to tracks.tra.in. this is not usually a problem, unless your DNS lookup takes longer than expected.)

so now try adding an alias to quickly display your todos! or you can set your shell up, like mine, to display a "message of the day" with a list of today's actions each time i open a new terminal. just add the command above to the end of your .bash_profile or .cshrc.

(Updated) don't want to wait? tracks.tra.in user and blogger ændrük provides a more extensive shell script that caches your todos for quicker terminal startups.

we're doing pretty great! we haven't had any problems or downtime since getting started on our new server in July 2007. (here's some more details on our server, and reasons why you might trust it.)

we are running the github bugfix branch for the latest stable release of Tracks, version 1.7, released in 2009.

Tracks 1.5 makes this option available, but not by default. Edit your tracks.tra.in preferences and enable "verbose action descriptors" to display project and context names in full. (I should rename this option.)

The new version of Tracks has changed the URLs for TXT, RSS, and iCal feeds. Old feed URLs will be redirected. If your feed reader experiences errors, please visit your feeds page to get new URLs.

Command-line users, you can tell curl to follow redirects with curl -L.

It's not that hard to add open signups: you just have to modify users_controller.rb a tiny bit. I added an "OPEN_SIGNUP = true" option to config/environment.rb: you need to set OPEN_SIGNUP in your deployment, too, for it to work.

Here's the patch, against the current git trunk for 1.7. I'll start putting stuff like this on github soon. (There's also a blog entry about this.)

diff --git a/app/controllers/users_controller.rb b/app/controllers/users_controller.rb
index 98f45cb..a8a722c 100644
--- a/app/controllers/users_controller.rb
+++ b/app/controllers/users_controller.rb
@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ class UsersController < ApplicationController
      @page_title = "TRACKS::Sign up as the admin user"
      @heading = "Welcome to TRACKS. To get started, please create an admin account:"
      @user = get_new_user
-    elsif @user && @user.is_admin?
+    elsif (@user && @user.is_admin?) || OPEN_SIGNUP
      @page_title = "TRACKS::Sign up a new user"
      @heading = "Sign up a new user:"
      @user = get_new_user
@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ class UsersController < ApplicationController
    end
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html do
-        unless User.no_users_yet? || (@user && @user.is_admin?)
+        unless User.no_users_yet? || (@user && @user.is_admin?) || OPEN_SIGNUP
          @page_title = "No signups"
          @admin_email = User.find_admin.preference.admin_email
          render :action => "nosignup", :layout => "login"