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!.
GTD, mac, tracks
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Posted in iMath
Written on Wed, 27 April 2005 at 8:21 pm
Tags: GTD, mac, tracks
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