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.