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Context headaches

I'm having a lot of trouble these days with contexts and wondering if anyone can help.

Basically, I'm finding it very artificial to work out of contexts. I sit there staring at my "Calls" list or my "Internet" list and lose sight of the reason for doing the actions that are on it. I'm finding that I work more effectively in "project" mode than in "context" mode. For me, the latter seems to divorce actions from their original environment, so that they don't make a lot of sense. When I make a call, my next thought isn't, "Yippee, let me see what other calls I can make." Rather, it's "what else do I need to do to push this project forward." If I think of the next action for a project, I'm more motivated to jump to that right away. But if next actions for that project are scattered among other context lists, then I have to rummage around through all my lists until I find them.

Also, multiple context lists encourage me to accumulate more to-dos than I might if I had only one list. This means a lot of less urgent items get mixed in with high priority stuff. Most often, I end up shuffling through all my context lists to find the items that need to be done sooner rather than later. But this would be easier if I just had one to-do list. Right?

At the moment, my contexts are: Calls, Email, Internet, Work (i.e., day job), Errands, Home, Office, and Mac (Mac specific stuff at home).

I'm thinking of reducing these to: Road, Home, Both. (In other words, things done only away from home, things done only at home, and things that can be done in both places).

Does this sound feasible? Or I am missing a crucial aspect of GTD? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

SteveC's picture

I'm running separate systems for...

I'm running separate systems for work and home. When I tried to combine them, I got even more depressed about work than usual, as all I could think of were the squillions of things I wasn't able to do at home, because I was stuck at work :-(

Considering the work system only, I have the following contexts:

@ desk
@ name [various agendas, one 5x3 per person]
@ waiting for

+ the document review tasks I regularly receive by email (which might as well stay in the email system)
+ any other email driven tasks (which I keep to a bare minumum of high urgency stuff)

My home system has more contexts -- if I'm in the garage, I really want to spend a fair amount of time there, I don't want to be dashing into the house every five minutes just because the next task in that project is to check something on the net.

I should point out that the work context list used to be much bigger, but it's shrunk over time, whereas the home list has grown.

Steve

 
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