Thanks for replying to my previous post, Merlin. I’m honored.

I suspect David works from home. The “43 Folders” method works iff you have access to the shelf where you keep them 24/7; eitherwise, you need two sets of 43 folders, one for the tasks you’re up to in the office, and another for the things you’re doing at home like concert tickets and mortgages and the like. (My wife works at home and is notoriously disorganized. She’s going to do the David Allen gather/purge thing Monday; I think I’ll prep a set of 43 Folders for her.) And if you’re going straight from the office to the baseball game, do you put the tickets in the previous day’s home tickler file to be moved to the office tickler file, or what? And if, like me, you have a third place, a cafe where a remarkable amount of work gets done… You can get lost in details like this. Not all of us have a car where we can keep the 43 Folders in the trunk either.

One of the things that I carry with me from my Franklin Planner days that’s an awkward fit for GTD is the notion of roles. For each project, there’s meta-info about the role I’m playing: I’m a father, a husband, a writer, an open-source programmer, an employee, and so on. David has his own context lists, things he can do out on the road, things he needs his wife’s advice to accomplish, things he can do when connected to the Internet, and so on. Working “context” into GTD seems to be an uncomfortable fit at the moment precisely because there’s a centralized repository that’s as big as a milk crate.

I wonder if investing in a hand-scanner and using a “43 Pages” Wiki is the solution. The two things I’m guaranteed to have at my side at all times are my laptop and my moleskien.