It's been great, reading about how others in academia handle contexts.

Here are mine:

@campus @Errands @Home @Papers @Phone @Printer (I don't have one attached to my usual computer) @Study/Office @fasttask (these are tasks that are fast, for when I need the triumph of completion) I also include a context for my spouse and other people I often work with.

As a writing instructor, the bulk of my teaching work is commenting on and grading student papers. Putting a task on the list like "Grade all the English 2 papers" overwhelmed me, though -- and could take more than a few days to complete. For a while I would put "Spend 1 hour grading" on the list. That was better, but I never actually got to cross it off the list, because until the end of the semester, there would always be at least an hour's worth of grading to do. Finally, I decided to list each student paper on my list, in a context called @Papers. I know it sounds like a waste of time to track each paper individually, but doing so makes me feel that the mammoth task of grading is actually getting done, even when I've only completed 5 out of 100 in my stack.

For other large projects, like reading and writing, I often used the "spend one hour on...." next action. This breaks the project down (and makes it seem like a widget to my brain) without trying to turn it into something more simple than it is.