I've recently chucked the idea of contexts entirely. As an academic, they caused me more pain than provided me any assistance, and I'd spent years trying to get them to work with my life. Adieu, GTD hegemony.

My trouble is that contexts that aren't related to physical constraint (either location or activity) are exercises in hoop-jumping. Is there ever a time when your "non-brain" context makes sense? I imagine you're trying to separate out the things you need to do to further your scholarship (hard, thinking work) and all the other crap you have to do in your life. There's an easier way to break things down: work and personal.

David Allen resists this breakdown because it's both intuitive and obvious, and he has nothing to add to it. If you've only got @personal and @work you've got something that's easy enough for Covey or some other time management guru to do, and has already done.

To be fair, I do use some of what I learned from my time in Contextville: I have a special lists lists for things to grab at the library, or at the store, or to talk about when Dr.XYZ when I see him next (this last one an example of @agenda, of course). Then again, I made those sorts of lists before I ever heard of DA, too.

My research is entirely solitary (English literature) and revolves around discovering things to read, reading them, writing about what I've read, and sharing what I've written. Then there's the teaching work, which has a similar list of finite steps. Those tasks are highly portable, not particularly granular, and allow for a lot of chronological and temporal flexibility. Because of that I've chosen to finally abandon GTD and use a much simpler, commonsensical approach.

That's not to say I've discarded everything GTD. On the contrary, I think I've taken away quite a bit from the system and am more in its debt that I recognize. But I've given up on trying to make fit what wasn't designed to fit, and accept that I'll have to wander the lone and dreary world alone, without the benefit of a time management guru to lead my way.

A pretty usual slate of contexts has served me well:

• offline
• emails
• web
• calls
• campus
• osf (library)
• office
• errands
• home
• mini (home computer)
• dirty (yardwork etc.)
• waitingfor
• agenda-boss
• agenda-wife
• agenda-project partner

I use a pretty basic set of contexts and rely a lot more on projects and project groups to help keep work tidy. After all, in academia nothing is ever a single task! Then the beaurocracy would starve.

Contexts (and subcontexts, a bad habit remaining from OF):
Bench
Office
Labmeeting
Computer > Email > Online
Home > Spare Time
Out & About > Errands
Phone
Location Specific Contexts
Person Specific Agendas

I have 'groups' of projects though. Different lab experiments that are being done for a specific (lab) project are grouped by project, and then these are sometimes grouped by grant. All the graphical projects are lumped together, and all of the powerpoint presentations are in a different lump. I actually keep my reading list as a project instead of a context, so I'll hit it more vigorously in reviews.

I used to use OF to manage all this, it worked really well for a while back in July. Then they started putting single actions in project view and it all went down the toilet from there. So now I'm back figuring out a new paper system, but I kept my project groups and contexts because they really got streamlined when OF worked for GTD.

I use a set of non-location based contexts for academic stuff.

@Reading
@Writing
@Research
@Thinking

Each class is a "Project" as well.

Break your work down into levels based on the amount of brain power required. @brain and !@brain aren't granular enough in my view. I like the idea though, so I would go with @brain1 @brain2 @brain3 for differing levels of motivation, time, etc. I think any more levels than this might begin to be fidgety.

The two criteria (excluding available tools because you would presumably need the same tools for each level and priority because you would decide that based on the items on your level list) energy and time should be congruent for each level. If you assign something a @brain1 level, then it shouldn't require a lot of time or energy. If you assign a @brain3, then it will require more time and more energy as well.

HTH

The "no-brain" vs. "lots of brain" distinction has more to do with energy and time than it does to do with location. David Allen recommends a schema of

Location --> Time --> Energy --> Priority

So it's best to keep your location contexts as physical places you need to be located to get things done -- e.g. Home, Office, Library, School, etc.

And you can specify the rest in a format that suits you. For me, I use the following:

@ Library(<30min): Look up and read the first chapter in this book for class X.

If you need to specify energy or priority, you can do that too:

@ Home(<60min-High Energy): ?

etc.

Hope that helps.

In that respect, it's like the @calls context, which is based on particular physical activity.

Except my list of things to read is either too long or too silly. Do I want to have "Read chapter 1 of X" followed by new NAs for each chapter? If not, then do you put "Read X" as a single NA even though it'll take you seven hours to complete?

For me one of the main difficulties of mapping GTD onto life in the humanities. I imagine it's difficult for artists as well: there's a certain level of administrative gunk that will benefit from GTD, but at some point your only task is to sit down and paint the damn picture. Somehow "@studio: paint portrait's left ear" is both hurtfully distracting and patently absurd.

I only mention it (again) because it took me a long time, a lot of wasted effort, and a lot of anguish to discover that for my work, GTD is only an 80% solution. The (large) number of things it adds are of considerable worth, but trying to get it to fit the last 20% is destructive and frustrating.

I'll bet that most academics who use GTD are in the sciences, where the varied tasks of designing and implementing experiments, working with others in a lab, or working with abstract data provide a sufficient diversity of tasks. In the humanities and (perhaps some of) the social sciences, follow David Allen's advice and pick up the tricks that will give you the biggest boost (and don't worry about ignoring the rest).

Since the OP didn't state her (his?) field, we're left to guess until given more info. Once she tells us that she's a computer scientist, I'll shut up and wonder what took her so long.

I tend to have NAs that say "Read X a bit". When I decided I've read X enough - which may be a paragraph or three chapters depending on my mood and inclination - I'll cross it off and put "Read X a bit" as a new item later on the list. FWIW, my NA lists are all paper, so this effectively rearranges the list, and makes me feel I'm progressing on that task.

(BTW, Hi, this is my first post. But I've been reading 43 folders for a while.)

This is helpful.

I'm in linguistics--a field that has characteristics of the humanities and the social sciences. My own research is varied and includes experimental work, more ethnographic, in-the-field observing and taking notes as well as reading texts of various sorts and analyzing them. And of course the standard reading and writing. I'm recently tenured and just coming off a year's sabbatical, so my committee load both within the department and in the institution has suddenly exploded exponentially.

The groupings I use now are:

home
errands
Internet
correspondance
On campus
Brain
No-brain
Waiting

I also played with using specific research project, courses, etc as "contexts", but I tended to avoid those that weren't immediately pressing (preparing for courses and advising independent projects are ALWAYS pressing). I tried three levels of relative "brain" for a while, but I found it really didn't help much, which led me to two.

All the contexts work pretty well except for Brain/No-Brain and I'll have to fiddle around with it--maybe just call it the 20% group and leave it at that. Or I may define it in terms of whether it needs more than 15 minutes to do--as that's often the real deciding factor about what I do or don't. It's true that the brain/no brain categories are of a different sort than the others. Work for me has no specific physical location--I work anywhere I have a computer pretty much.

I've just started adding dedicated research time to my calendar and that's helpful (though I'm using it now to type this--I should probably also schedule "play" time)

I also have MailTags which filters e-mail messages into folders: Answer, Reference, Requires action (like writing a letter), Requires reading an attachment (like a student paper). That works great and has made e-mail immensely more managable.

I *do* think there are unique elements to those of us in academia trying to implement GTD. The issues are not really the GTD workflow itself but rather the unique nature of the work academics have to get done. I wrote at length about this here.