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Someday, Maybe Never- project or context?

I recently moved a load of actions from a project (things to write about in my tech blog) [1] into my Someday, Maybe Never project, and then it suddenly struck me that maybe it wasn't a project at all, but a context. It makes sense if you think about it from the Contexts view - when you're executing, you just look at the context you're in at the time (calls, errands etc) and because you've never given one of your active contexts to the actions, you never see them in your current context context. In Projects/Planning mode, they're probably just single action projects anyway, because you've not put sufficient thought into them for them to acquire any structure. The benefits of treating SMN as a context to me include:

  • Not having a single, ever-growing SMN 'lump' that makes you feel like you're deferring too much, and tempts you to keep thinking about the things you've filed in there to check whether they really can wait
  • Keeping Projects views focused on real, actual projects with no Maybe distractions

Maybe this makes no sense to anyone but me. Thoughts?


[1] the reason is, I'm trying to work out how to get paid for writing that stuff, and refocusing my unpaid writing time on something more creative

spride's picture

Re: Someday, Maybe Never- project or context?

Right. I was a bit shocked when, after having experimented with 'Inactive' topics, I went to restore from a backup in a very early alpha of OF and found that it hadn't been backing up the Inactive objects. Naturally I bugfiled it, and I should check that it no longer does that. Inactive may be the way to go.

I'm leery of running a separate SMN list because of the dogma of having only one system (sure, you can argue that OF/kGTD plus separate SMN file constitutes a single system, but you're adding complexity and more 'moving parts' to what should be a rock-solid reliable system for you, and the riskiest part of the system is you yourself and your diligence at executing the review activities).

 
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