Am I missing something or is tracks. One of the major concepts of GTD is that Projects have a next action. The one thing you have to do next to move the project forward. I can’t see how to implement this in tracks. It seems that Tracks classes everything I add to a project as a next action. In fact the text says “Add A Next Action” when what I really want to do is add an action to the project but it won’t be the next action.

I know I could always make the next action the topmost action but that doesn’t help in reporting. For example, TiddlyWiki GTD has a report that shows you the next action for each project and the context so for example I could see all the “single next actions” for each of the 3 projects I’m working on whilst at the context of @Work.

This isn’t a huge issue I know and maybe I’m just missing something. I love the software, thank you. I have it installed locally on a Mac using Locomotive. I can’t remember where I got the instructions from but I think they were linked from this site, thanks to whoever posted them.

No, you’re not missing something: categorising ONE action as the next action is not currently possible in the stable version.

Several people have commented on that here:

<http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/forums/viewthread/96>
<http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/forums/viewthread/121>

Those discussions should give you the full story, but briefly, projects can quite validly have more than one possible next action. Of course, you can only do one thing at a time, but there might be several things you could potentially do next.

In the trunk, we have tagging, which would allow you to tag actions as ‘nextaction’, and then view those across all your projects and contexts. I am also still thinking about setting project dependencies, so that if one action depended on the completion of another, you could mark the second inactive until the first was completed.

I’m just getting started with GTD, and all actions in a project becoming next actions initially threw me, too. However, since it seems to me that when an action becomes a next action it is pretty obvious in which context it belongs, I created a hidden context “notNA” to hold all the project actions that aren’t currently actionable. Since the context is hidden, these items do not show up in my home view, but they do show up in the particular project’s view. Then, when completing a next action in a project makes one or more notNA actions actionable, I simply give those items a valid context.

A good idea could be assigning a tag to all actions with dependent actions. This way, you make sure you don’t mark one of those as done and forget to change the context of the actions that depend on it.

The problem of your method is that you have to reprocess the context of all actions that depend on others once the mother actions are done.