My first take at next-action management was done in Ecco Pro, and was very similar to this. I also tried doing the same thing in LifeBalance.

It seems the intuitive thing to do— a database table of next actions, linked relationally to a table of contexts, as well as any other metadata that seems useful. But I found that I spent, in both implementations, too much time drilling down into single next-action entries, updating them and their meta-data.

I am now much more happy with a freeform, notepad-style next-action list.

Heirarchical contexts makes sense too, at first. LifeBalance actually encourages you to do this. But, again, I found this slowing me down. I now just have 3 contexts: @Office, @Home, @Car.