The original language of GTD is loose enough that ‘context’ is just a distinction you make between different types of tasks to make your lists smaller and easier so you don’t feel overwhelmed, and to put similar things in the same space so you can do one after another if they have similar requirements to get down. The way the David Allen company has continued coaching it is entirely in line with that too. ‘Waiting For’ and ‘Someday Maybe’ are both used as contexts to them. I’m not concerned with what is or isn’t GTD, but if you’re going to talk about GTD, it’s always been that way, and they’ve always been open about that. If you’re not using entirely separate flat lists, ‘context’ is just a tag meant to organize data on another level that isn’t hierarchy. Plenty of people now use energy levels and time as contexts as mentioned.
I personal don’t find it hard to enter contexts because I keep their names short, and their numbers few. You can have a context that for you means “things I would like to considering doing someday,” or “things I would only like to do when I’m tired,” but you don’t have to name them in that way. I’ve varied over the years, but I tag things I’m waiting for with ‘@w’ or just a ‘w’. If it’s something that won’t take any brain power to do, I consider it shallow work and use @s or s. All of my contexts work like that, and I don’t have too many because that usually serves as ways of hiding things so I don’t see them, which is the opposite of effectively managing and making decisions on them. I also don’t do ‘someday’ in contexts because anything not on a todo view or with a context is a pipe dream, and if it isn’t, I’ll just tag it and have it show up when it should based on date or sequence or dependency. I’ve actually found it better to store that stuff outside of MLO because at that point it’s just reference notes and past thinking, though MLO’s Markdown support and potential for a ‘note’ designation may bring it back in for me. Having contexts parse out as things are typed is simple in this case, as is clicking on a context to assign it to one or more tasks. Moving it under an existing task with that context also works, and in the very off chance it doesn’t, you just change the context of that task. And to Dwight: I wouldn’t consider you trying to discuss things with people as defensive. If people bring up issues and requests on a public forum, discussing them is kind of the point. That is the only point of a forum. That is what a forum is. Discussing something doesn’t mean blindly agreeing with it or leaving it unexamined. If someone said they’d like MLO to have a field for ‘dogs’ in it, the best response probably wouldn’t be “sure thing! We’ll add it to the list,” particularly not if that user went on for 4 or more years saying MLO was silly and unacceptable and stupidly clumsy for not having implemented the ‘dog’ feature that made no sense and had no real utility, and was requested by a user that by their own admission no longer used the program. If that user wasn’t willing to take half a second to tag something with ‘dog’, they also apparently don’t value their desired ‘dog’ functionality very much. Bending the development team over backwards to add in dog-like functionality seems like a waste of resources, and trying to discuss that first would appear to be the more fruitful course of action than burning more time and money. Best, S -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mylifeorganized+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to mylifeorganized@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/cf096155-7c67-4a47-a36d-4d28cee090af%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
