[…] It mightn’t surprise you to know I’d want to learn a bit more implementation and about how David sees contexts working best for people whose work mostly happens in one place (recently). […]

I’ve started using virtual desktops to help focus my contexts. For example, my “mail” desktop has all my inboxes: mail, RSS, news, etc. I find this helps to make me focus on processing my new mail and then getting away from it entirely (out of sight, out of mind) so I’m not hitting refresh all day. Right now my “code” desktop has my text editor and some documentation open. Firefox lives there too (web developer extensions), but Safari is on my “browsing” desktop. When I move between desktops, I can actually feel like I’m switching contexts.

I have 3 contexts. Work, Home and Errands. I suppose there’s a hidden 4th (Work/Home) where I can basically do it in either place. These are constrained, as Merlin mentioned, by physicality & rules (for example, I could physically file Magic: the Gathering cards at work, but it’s, uh, frowned upon).

For waiting, I tag a “Waiting for …” task with a date (the equivalent of putting it in a tickle folder) and it disappears until said day.

I find it’s simple and very useful. I mean, I know whether a task involves me searching the web or writing an email. Tagging it as such is redundant.

Peter

Another great post Merlin. Your ability to clearly communicate what we all know we should know is great. Keep it up!

I have too many contexts and have fallen off the wagon in a big way due to the ensuing where-the-hell-do-I-put-this-itis. Thanks to all for inspiring me to dust myself off an kick some ass again.

For those interested in a way to easily mix place, effort and time for any given task, check out MyLifeOrganized. They have a really nice way to do exactly this without maintaining separate contexts. You essentially move sliders and a score is computed, then you can view by time needed, place you’re in or effort available. It’s a Windows app, but I run it under Parallels. Lightweight enough to be self-contained on a USB key.

These have been working quite well for me:

Work contexts:

1) @PC 2) @Telephone [Although most calls are made from my desktop, I find value in a separate phone context, if only because of the momentum created by making that first call. It’s a different mindset for me, and I can blow through a list in short order… once I make that first call.] 3) @Office [This encourages me to live away from my computer upon occasion. For example, it’s refreshing to brainstorm ideas on paper instead of continually basking in the phosporescent glow of the one-eyed beast. My eyes thank me, too.] 4) @Waiting For 5) @Agendas [The specific people vary by project cycles. I typically have 3-6 at any given time.]

Home Contexts:

1) @Home 2) @PC - Home 3) @House/Auto [This is for home improvement and auto maintenance. Even though this stuff is technically at home, it typically requires a different context such as putting on grubby clothes and going outside.] 4) @Waiting For 5) @Agendas 6) @Errands

And I do it all using some Word-based 3x5 card templates I ginned up after being inspired by reading Emory’s compelling white paper a few months ago. (The HipsterPDA templates were a bit too cluttered for my taste.)

Emory’s paper: http://kvet.ch/pages/gtd-whitepaper-emory

I’m a writer working at home, so @computer, @phone, @home never really worked for me. Instead, I’ve matched my contexts to the way I structure my workday. The morning, from 8am - noon is for writing and editing. The afternoon, from 1 - 5 is for research, reading, email, website maintenance, etc. The evening is for entertainment and housework.

So on my @morning list, I have: - Stories I can start drafting - Drafts that need editing

My @afternoon list may contain: - Research that needs to get done - Phone calls to make - Email to send - Photos to take - Website maintenance issues - My “to read” file

My evenings are pretty unstructured, but my @evening list may contain: - Household chores - Adding movies to Netflix cue - Potentially long personal phone calls

My only other context is @errands, which is basically a shopping list, which I do either on my lunch break or in the evenings, as needed.

So far, this system has helped to keep my workday structured, which is never easy when your at home sitting in front of a computer with a high-speed connection all day.

For people who have very few physical contexts (work or home, computer or non-computer) but want to take advantage of the advantages that contexts offer, we can overlay time and energy constraints (contexts.) This is in line with the natural planning method’s “4 criteria.”

So now items would have multiple, but non-overlapping, contexts.

Location -work -computer -out

Time -short (greater than 2 min, less than 15) -med (15 min - 1 hr) -long (greater than an hour)

Energy -high (I can do anything) -med (I can do anything which isn’t too taxing) -low (I can barely stay awake)

So now an item might have a contexts:

Process today’s email: @computer med low Outline report: @desk (i.e. computer plus materials) long high

Obviously, generating and managing context lists of multiple, orthogonal contexts isn’t going to be very practical by hand. This type of system would best be served by some sort of computer automation (I’m trying to get it done using Mori notebook.) With the right tool, I think it could be pretty powerful. For example, you could be sitting at your computer having just finished preparing for a big meeting in 20 min: “Ok, I’ve got a lot of energy (latent anxiety for the upcoming presentation) but not a lot of time: computer high short.” It would most likely be suited by smart folders or dynamically generated lists, like the filtered lists of many media database programs.

My only contexts are:

@pc @work @home @phone @car

I’m a project manager for ICT “stuff” and I always, but always ask the question “what is the next physical action to be done?”. I know it’s ‘by the book’, but it works for me. Just 4 contexts provide me with the focus I need. I balance this with @agenda.

Hope this helps someone

I’m a graduate student in mechanical engineering. I have ADD and I’ve found that making contexts based on what kind of thinking I need to do really helps with that (ADD people are notoriously bad at changing gears). For example, I think differently when I’m doing math homework on paper versus doing a math programming assignment versus writing code for my research, so those would each be seperate contexts. I still keep my context list to around 10 contexts; any more than that, and it’s useless.

As a small-scale IT projects manager I think I have an overly complicated system. These are my current contexts, naturally subject to change:

@Write (PIDs, Reports etc, stuff that never gets done if I am honest) @Interanet (sic) (Some of my work applications are web-based) @Agenda (meetings at work as well as stuff to talk to my family or the builder) @Phone @Email @Errands This gives me 6 columns of contexts on my a4 book, wide enough for mini post-its which I use to handle my next actions.

Each post-it has three sections:

I’m a designer/developer and general hacker-geek…

I mostly eschew contexts in favor of project-specific Next Action lists.

Since I tend to set aside chunks of time (“okay, tonight I’m working on X”) for a specific project, I just switch over to that “context” list and work through the next actions for that project.

Anything that doesn’t fall within a project goes on a Miscellaneous list. I never have more than about 20 miscellaneous next actions, so they all go on one list.

As for traditional contexts like phone, computer, email, web — or even work, home, car — I haven’t seemed to need them. At work, I work on “work” projects, and at home I work on everything else. I’m always near an online computer and a phone. When I’m not at the computer, I’m generally in “leisure” mode and not trying to get anything done.

So, anyway, I guess that puts me with Cari :-)

@BMEguy: I think you’re on to a winner there. Why not encode time and energy requirements into your NAs while you’re assigning a context? Seems like a great way to push up the information density of the lists and “get the thinking out of the way” during the Weekly Review.

How about using plain text files and grep to dynamically filter things? It’s very fast once you get used to the terminal.

I find that I work mainly within the “Projects” view of kGTD for precisely this reason. At least when it comes to my professional projects, I tend make decisions based on which project feels like a high priority on a given day and what deadlines are looming. The only contexts which feel really functional to me at this point are home vs. work. I have my phone with me most everywhere, ditto for my laptop. Even the errands context feels a little forced, since I tend to plan my errands when at home, not when I’m actually in the “errand” context of being out and about. I guess this speaks to my need for a more mobile implementation, but I really like kGTD and I’m not all that eager to add to my list of things I need to sync. Like you said, I think it comes down to maintaining a tracking system that works for you. If that means relying less on the idea of contexts for deciding what to do at any given moment, I’m ok with that.

Can I also just say how much I love the fact that within kGTD (well, Omni Outliner in general) I can collapse whole projects and just focus on one at a time. THAT feature is what really helps me narrow down my options. It’s like virtually shutting one mental closet and opening another.

You want to be a little careful with the “open” tag, if you use it at all. If you find yourself applying it, it often means that you need to break it down to get the real next action. I had “@vaio open tag music library” for a while. Ploughing through 40GB of mp3s checking that they’re all labelled neatly is impossible, so I never did it.

Writer here. I struggled with this and eventually found that one context worked fine for me. Later when I looked back at the GTD book, I found that it gave this approach its blessing, albeit a backhanded one. Something like, “If you’re not as busy as me, you may find that a single Next Action list works for you.”

Nice post, Merlin! I’m a man of few contexts myself, and it works rather well for me. Having fewer contexts means I’ll review my lists of actions a bit more - some may consider this a waste of time but I find that it helps stimulate my thinking, almost like a mini-review (which is good, because I’m no role model when it comes to real reviews…).

Personally, I’d rather read through, say, 40 Next Actions in one @work context than 5 work-related contexts with 8 actions each. I think sometimes we tend to try to use a system like GTD to replace thinking, which it cannot. better to spend one’s energy thinking about the tasks than the contexts, IMHO.

From the perspective of a college student balancing school, work, multiple organizations (President of 3), the number of contexts can explode on you. I used to have a context for physical locations on campus such as @Hughes-Trigg (the student life building). It worked well until I started backsliding.

Here’s my current list of contexts: @(agenda, brainstorm, email, call, computer, goto, waiting, work).

Also from the college student perspective I can say that having pure location based contexts will destroy you. I work, live, and go to school on the same campus, and my contexts break down to @(calls, errand, laptop (wireless university), dorm, campus) where campus engulfs everything that isn’t my dorm and errand requires me to go off site.

In the @campus context I have sub-contexts to remind me where I need to be (@office for example). But I try to even keep those to a minimum.

What if some of you long-time GTDers share your contexts with those of us who are just getting started? Maybe we all can learn something… :-)

I like the idea above of using duration. Sounds worth a try. I currently have contexts like ‘writing’ ‘design”research’ ‘contact’ becasue those activities take very different levels of mental energy, and I can kind of pick from the kind of activity I feel best able to do.

Very good series. Just what I needed to get back into shape!

Ryan

I find tagging by time helpful. 2 minutes (i.e. do now…), 20 minutes, an hour, and open works for me. If you’re stuck for something to do, you probably know where you are, what tools you have access to, and how long you’ve got. Rather than building infinite ziggurats of contexts and subcontexts, you can narrow the choice down by considering the likely duration of the task.

Of course, your estimate is sometimes wrong. Sometimes it rains.

I keep my lists in a Hipster PDA, with different card for each context and project list. I have cards for Work, Home, and Someday/Maybe Projects, as well as the following contexts:

@office @office-onhold @office-waiting @home @home-waiting @errands @<wife’s name>

However, my contexts are malleable. If a context has no next actions, it has no card. Also, if I need to add one or more temporary contexts (for example, agendas) I do that as well.

My main problem right now, though, is that I sometimes look at my @home context during coffee and lunch breaks while at my job, so it’s not really a “home-only” context. Does anybody have any ideas for a more task-based context list that can still keep work tasks walled off for on-the-clock at-my-desk time?

Brad, you must spend a lot of time on hold!

Regarding your home/work tasks, is it necessarily a bad thing that you review that list while at the office? I do the same thing sometimes, with actions like paying a bill online that can be done at either computer.

Personally, I prefer this bit of crossover to adding an @computer context for the stuff that can be done at any computer (or, even worse, adding @computer, @internet, @internet connnected-PC-with-my-utility-company-billpay-address-and-password-handy-and-I’m-in-the- mood-for-mundane-bill-paying-tasks contexts).

But, these systems are very personal, and while I might find it OK to review both home and work contexts throughout the workday, you might have a new context waiting to emerge and add lots of efficiency to how you do GTD.

[…] ?????????????????????“??”?????????????????????“???”??????“??”???“????”?“???”?“??”?“??”????????Merlin Mann?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????“??”?????????????“??”??????????????????????????????????????????????“??”????????????????????????????????????? GTD????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????GTD??????????? ?????“??GTD-??????”–??43folders.com […]

Bravo. More than any single other GTD element, I think the concept of contexts is what throws a lot of people off. I know it has for my friends, when I excitedly told them to read GTD.

For me, GTD was always a struggle until I woke one morning and had the epiphany: I don’t work, or think, in contexts. I think my jaw actually dropped when I realized that. I quickly got rid of the @work, @phone, @whatever stuff, and immediately started thinking in terms of projects. The really interesting thing was that there was no learning curve to this change. Within 20 minutes, I felt the true water-like-mind thing ahappenin’. It’s been a pretty groovy ride since (that and configuring Entourage to be my one and only digital tool).

A great series, Merlin. I love the re-focus on GTD. Thanks

[…] Merlin’s recent post on contexts helped clear up my thinking. He identifies a key question about something that might be considered a GTD context: what tools, resources, opportunities, and limitations are unique to this situation?” He then recommends consolidating contexts that don’t provide a unique answer to this question. […]

I have 2 contexts:

@work @home

@home is basically everything i’m not allowed to do at work (personal phone calls/blogs/bills). this is the only distinction as i have to tools and everything necessary to do 90% of my GTD stuff either at home or at work

Oops, some of my post got slurped because it resembled HTML:

My person-specific @agenda items say “Talk to <name> about blah blah blah…”

Using custom views, I set up smart buckets like “@Agenda: <Boss>”

I just started GTD but something occurred to me about the buckets. It seems OK to have more buckets if you don’t have to put stuff in them yourself.

For instance, some people have @agenda contexts for various people they work with. I’m using Entourage, where contexts are categories. My person-specific @agenda items say “Talk to about blah blah blah…” Using custom views, I set up smart buckets like “@Agenda: ” which select items that are categorized @agenda and whose title contains my boss’s name. It may not be 100% reliable, but false negatives can be reduced by training myself to put my boss’s name in things that I want to talk to her about (isn’t that a good idea anyway?) And false positives can be safely ignored.

The same can be done for @computer contexts, based on what verbs appear in the task title. An task marked “Print ” can be inferred into a @Computer: Print context.

As for time- and energy-based contexts, I think that’s a neat idea but I want to wait until I have whole screenfuls of tasks for a single location. If I can see everything for a particular context, I think I have an idea of how much time or energy some of the things will take and I can grab the right thing.