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Deciding my context
Jamie Phelps | Feb 24 2006
I am a graduate student (about to return to undergraduate but that's a different story) and I have two student worker jobs on campus, all of which gives me a lot of discretionary time and that is really dangerous for me. My work duties and both jobs never take more than an hour to complete and the rest of the time is basically just being there to answer the phone, answer questions, etc. I also spend a lot of time at my local Einstein's Bagels shop in the mornings. Ostensibly, all of this discretionary "free" time would help me GTD, but I find that I have a huge difficulty naming my context. For instance, @Work could mean reading that reading assignment for class, doing my Greek translation, writing code, pissing away time online, research on the library's site, writing some on my four term papers that aren't due until the end of April, learning Croatian, posting on board.43folders.com. I think you get the idea. So, when I sit down at work or Einstein's, I have so many options of what to do that I usually go with pissing away time online since my school's wireless internet reaches to Einstein's. Even without the internet, I can find a way to piss away two hours in a hurry. So, how do you identify what it is exactly that you should be doing in ambiguous contexts? Or am I making this into something it's not when I should just be more conscious of the issues I mentioned above? 10 Comments
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 I think, for me, pretty...Submitted by terrym on March 1, 2006 - 6:45am.
I think, for me, pretty much everything on my lists would come under @Work. So rather than than I use the standards ones @Agenda, @Waiting for, etc etc, but the trouble I've had with contexts is everything else tended to get chucked into @Office. In here would be items that begin, "Write service level agreements for such-an-such", which would involve lots of research and drafts and general head-scratching and so on, as well as items like "File all the outstanding staff absense forms", which are pretty straightforward and more physical, if you see what I mean. And in amongst all that would be many vague, not-immediately-doable stuff that needs more thinking about. After reading Merlin's context post, I was encouraged to revisit my contexts, and separate out the ones that involve, say, writing, from more general office work. My trouble, I think, is in adding things to my next actions list (doing) which are really projects that require more clarity (thinking). My next task is to revisit all my projects, as I think I've got some someday/maybes in there, and lots without clear outcomes defined. » POSTED IN:
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