neverendingbooks

I just
started putting my mind on tracks but it will take
me a couple of days to offload most of the crap that keeps me awake at
night. There are three main components to Tracks: Next actions, Contexts
and Projects.

“Contexts are very flexible, and can
be places, states of mind or modes of working in which actions can be
taken. Next actions can be assigned to and sorted by context so that you
know when you are able to make progress with items. e.g. “Library”,
“Shops” or “Tired”.” So far I added only 10 contexts : _@inbox_,
_@books_, _@email_, _@home_, _@neverending_,
_@courses_, _@other_, _@papers_, _@computer_
and _@personal_. Probably I’ll have to add others such as
_@refereeing_ etc.

“Projects : any goal
which requires more than one next action to take it to completion is a
Project. In Tracks, you can view your next actions by Project.” So far I
added the first few things that came to mind ranging from small-easy
things such as _Learn
VoodooPad_ over _Paper with Jan_ to neverending-things
like Write nag@n !

“Next
actions : These are the heart of GTD. They are the very next
physical action that can be taken on something. It’s best to phrase
these in an active way e.g. “Call Bob about the committee meeting” or
“Search for a reputable garage”.” Up to now I merely added the next
foreseeable action in each project together with a few urgent persoanl
matters. It is a good idea to give each of these a deadline so they
appear on the screen with a color-code giving the date and red (urgent),
orange (coming up) to green (some day). I realize I’ve been rather
relaxed about my projects so far!

More information on tracks can
be found here. Try it
out!

Perhaps I
can surprise you by admitting that I’ve spend a lot of time lately
getting through Getting Things Done:
The Art of Stress-free Productivity, 250+ pages of management
babble. Probably you will even be shocked when I tell you that this book
is published in the same series as _Body Talk at Work_,
_Corporate Charisma_, _More Time Less Stress_, _Mrs
Moneypenny : Survival in the City_ and more of these. All in all, it
wasn’t so bad. It is a bit pompous at times, could be 50% condensed but
I wanted to find out first hand what all the GTD hype
was about (see this post for
some of the more interesting links).

I’m not looking for a miracle
method to become more productive or focussed (although I wouldn’t mind
either at the moment). No, my main motivation is simply : I want to be
able to sleep better!

This requires some explaining. The last
couple of months, I regularly wake up in the middle of the night and as
there are plenty of things on my mind, I start brooding on them and,
more often than not, loose a couple of hours sleep/night. And these
quickly add up! Now, the basis of the GTD-mantra is getting all the
_stuff_ out of your head to reach the _mind like water_
state whatever that means. And I can see some sense in putting all your
current projects and worries somewhere on paper or computer, setting up
a system that forces you to read through these lists at regular
intervals, plan _next actions_ and update the lists accordingly.
If you trust this system it just may free your mind from all the
stuff!

At a later stage I may end up setting up such a system
following the suggestions of the
DevonThink Forum or using
VoodooPad but at the moment all I want is to offload my mind as
quickly as possible to a GTD-able database.

Fortunately, But She’s a Girl has
compiled such a system : Tracks, a GTD Web
Application. At first I did the mistake following the generic
install instructions and quickly got lost in downloading packages from
SourceForge etc. until I found that there was an easy Mac OS X
Install Page. There is a Ruby and Rails .dmg
package but first you have to install Tcl/Tk Aqua. After these
easy steps, you have to follow the install man page which involves setting up a MySQL database and
filling it with the required tables (I have been using
phpmyadmin for this, but discovered in the process CocoaMySQL which makes all
this even simpler). Finally, you have to get to prompt-level and type
the magic commands

_cd Sites/tracks_

_ruby
script/server “”environment=production” port=3030_

(note
to self : make this a StartUp item as otherwise you have to redo this
step whenever you want to add material). Then,
_http://127.0.0.1:3030/login/signup_ gets you to a nice
webpage-interface and you can start to offload your mind of
_stuff_. I’ll report later whether it did have any effect at
all!.

I am trying to put all our music onto one old iMac to make a
HomeJukeBox but ran into an annoying problem. I discovered a pile of 70
Audio-CDs which PD1 ripped away
from home (and more importantly,
away
from internet-access) so if you feed them to iTunes they
only display Track01, Track02 etc. that is, _no_ songtitles,
_no_ artist name, _no_ album information etc. making them
pretty useless for my purposes. Fortunately PD1 wrote on each CD the
Artist and Album names giving me at least a fighting chance to get all
information. Here is how I managed to do this without too much typing
(probably there are other and better methods around but as I am still
waiting for my copy of iPod and
iTunes Hacks to arrive and as I am not the world most adventurous
person I prefer to stick with the first method I tried that
worked).\\r\\nI had a look at the huge collection of Doug's
AppleScripts for iTunes and found on his 'internet-section'
the script CDDB Safari Kit v2.2.1 which he describes as
\\r\\n

These two AppleScripts, “CDDB
Safari” and “CDDB Tracks to iTunes via Safari”, assist
in finding and retrieving Album track names, Album, Artist, and Year
from Gracenote's CDDB website using Apple's Safari browser.

\\r\\nAs this is pretty much what I want, I downloaded
these 2 AppleScripts and put them into my
~Library/iTunes/Scripts folder (you probably will have
to create the Scripts folder) making them available from the Script-menu
in iTunes. \\r\\nNow, insert a CD and double-click on its icon in iTunes
so that its Track 01 Track 02 etc. appear in a separate window. Single
click on a Track to get it marked and then open the CDDB
Safari script from the iTunes-script-menu. A pop-up menu
appears asking you what info you like to find. Click on Album or Artist
to mark them and then click on the highlighted Search
CDDB button and Safari will take you to the Gracenote: Search CDDB site.
Fill in either Artist name or Album name and hit Search. If you are
lucky a list of all song-titles will appear or (in case their are
several options) a list of all relevant Artist/Album combinations from
which you have to click the relevant one and you will get the
songtitle-list. Go back to iTunes and open the CDDB Tracks to
iTunes via Safari script again from the iTunes-script-menu. You
will be guided through the process : it will collect the song-titles and
ask you to use them or not and afterwards it will also ask you to add
Artist-Album-Year info as well, single click on all info you want to
include and press Yes and thank the Script for all its work. Close the
iTunes window and drag the CD icon (which now has the appropriate name)
to the desired playlist and all lost information is regained! There are
a few caveats : check whether the number of songtitles on the
Gracenote-page matches that on your CD and pray that PD1 has not made
her personal sublist of tracks… further some extremely alternative
CDs are not in the database (out of the 50 I tried so far only one
failed) and finally there seems to be a problem with French accents.