Contexts vs. Priority question

[Sarahsuccess]

In thinking about what contexts to use for my deferred next actions list, I found that the original suggested contexts of Calls, At Computer, At Office, At Home etc. were not working for me. I am grateful to #mcogilvie for sharing his three office task contexts, "Timely", "MIT - Most Important Things", and "Opportunity". He shared them in this thread: Naming for two business next action groups. I am currently using them, and I find they help me to better clarify, organize and do tasks. They make me more productive and get more things done.

However, I have a niggling question that those three contexts are actually priority setting and not contexts in the pure GTD sense. In the book Getting Things Done (2015, page 146) David Allen defines contexts as "either the tool, or the location or the situation needed to complete [the action]". Those three contexts seem to be none of those. David also says (pages 144-145), "...you shouldn't bother to create some external structuring of the priorities on your lists that you'll then have to rearrange or rewrite as things change. Attempting to impose such scaffolding has been a big source of frustration in many people's organizing. You'll be prioritizing more intuitively as you see the whole list against quite a number of shifting variables. The list is just a way for you to keep track of the total inventory of active things to which you have made a commitment, and to have that inventory available for review." I think David is referring here to the Franklin Planner daily list prioritizing by A, B, & C. However, those three contexts seem quite similar to prioritizing. This quote, which I originally read years ago, gave me a subtle undercurrent of anxiety that unless my lists are completely current, I could not effectively choose what to do. The three contexts I use now allow me to feel confident to choose tasks to do even if my lists are not 100% current.

The three contexts of Timely, MIT and Opportunity are working for me, and I intend to continue using them, however on the principle of the matter, I would like to hear from experienced GTD members whether or not they think these categories contradict the original intention of contexts in a pure GTD sense. I would especially appreciate if #mcogilivie could speak to this.

Thank you

 

[Lucas W.]

In my opinion they are contradict and they will reduce your motivation to regularly review all of your lists and keep your system current.

I did something like that in the past but after a while of practicing GTD I have found it to be inefficient and making a friction in the system. I believe that the same applies to the popular distinction between personal and professional tasks.

But I am not sure if you should force yourself to do exactly as written in the book – I didn’t do it myself – just at some point in the past it was a natural adjustment.

 

[mcogilvie]

Hi Sarah,

I have evolved my system a little since I wrote that. I still use Timely, Important and Opportunity as categories to organize how I see projects and next actions. I have used the Area level of Things for these. This ensures that I don’t inadvertently
miss projects and next actions which are time-sensitive or important. All my next actions are tagged with contexts, which are useful often enough to justify the effort of tagging. This works well for me, and I don’t see myself changing my system in a major way any time soon.

I don’t think any of this is really contradictory to the spirit of GTD. First of all, it is easier for me than a vanilla paper style implementation, which always made me anxious. With paper lists, items appear in the order they are written. You may have cleared your head of the action, but you have to maintain some kind of metadata about what it means to you. I can’t see anything wrong in objectifying some of that metadata. Second, it’s not about prioritizing, it’s about how I want to see things. I still make intuitive choices, but I’m not relying solely on my intuition in the moment. I’ve preserved some of my earlier thinking of what a project or next action means to me. Finally, consider the standard recommendation for time-sensitive actions and projects: put items with deadlines on your calendar. This is essentially having a time-sensitive category for your projects and next actions which lives outside of context lists. What I do is more flexible, gives me advance notice of upcoming due dates, and I do have contexts for all those next actions.

If you feel like your system is working well for you, that’s good. When things do not seem to be going well, it can be surprisingly difficult to figure out why. Subtle changes to a good, functioning system can have a big impact. If you feel that you are growing and learning, that is probably the best sign you are headed in a good direction.

 

[HelenM]

I'm not sure I could call myself an experienced GTD practitioner...but Contexts are something I've been playing around with recently. As I work almost entirely from home, the work / office / home context doesn't work for me. Calls rarely come up - I avoid the telephone whenever possible - and other than Errands most of my things fall into a Home category. That's not super helpful, so I do a mix of category and "priority". I should add I'm probably ADHD or similar and if something isn't going "hey, this is kinda urgent" and isn't right under my nose, I am likely to skim over it! I also have more than one reminder for things that are critical (see ADHD)...

My contexts look like:
Locations at home - Upstairs; Outside etc. (I have a lot of garden projects ongoing)
A rough due date as additional metadata - this is more for helping me sort and filter, and in most cases is fairly arbitrary! This is totally anti-GTD officially I guess, but it works for my slightly scrambled brain.
I also note Area of Focus and Horizon 3 (where applicable) against NAs, which is useful when I want to have a Focus Day. So I can pull out all my Garden tasks, or all my Family, Home or Self Development for example. (I use Excel so I have many many filters)

Anything that is a Must Do (Today) goes into my Bullet Journal (bujo) daily page.
Any time-based appointments go in my work Outlook calendar and my Future Log in my bujo - I don't have access to my work calendar remotely - and added to the relevant bujo daily. (see multiple reminders above!)

I guess, it's whatever works for you. David actually talks a bit about this, can't remember if it's in GTD or MIAW but he met someone who has a "brain dead" context, for those times when you Just Cannot. When he discusses priority he points out it's something you have to consider on multiple changing axes at once - urgency, location, resources, values, focus area, energy etc. MIAW does a bit more of a dive into this gnarly issue of prioritising. My tagging / filtering just helps me with reviewing some of those so as to inform my decision making.

It's really about what those context tags mean to you specifically, so "timely" might not mean right now, but this is something you're going to need to get to before some of those other things. If it works and it gets things done and you're not dropping important balls, I'd say it's fine!

 

[Sarahsuccess]

In my opinion they are contradict and they will reduce your motivation to regularly review all of your lists and keep your system current.

I did something like that in the past but after a while of practicing GTD I have found it to be inefficient and making a friction in the system. I believe that the same applies to the popular distinction between personal and professional tasks.

But I am not sure if you should force yourself to do exactly as written in the book – I didn’t do it myself – just at some point in the past it was a natural adjustment.

What contexts did you use that you found to be inefficient and making friction?
What contexts have you 'naturally adusted' to?
Thanks

 

[Sarahsuccess]

Hi Sarah,

I have evolved my system a little since I wrote that. I still use Timely, Important and Opportunity as categories to organize how I see projects and next actions. I have used the Area level of Things for these. This ensures that I don’t inadvertently miss projects and next actions which are time-sensitive or important. All my next actions are tagged with contexts, which are useful often enough to justify the effort of tagging. This works well for me, and I don’t see myself changing my system in a major way any time soon.

I don’t think any of this is really contradictory to the spirit of GTD. First of all, it is easier for me than a vanilla paper style implementation, which always made me anxious. With paper lists, items appear in the order they are written. You may have cleared your head of the action, but you have to maintain some kind of metadata about what it means to you. I can’t see anything wrong in objectifying some of that metadata. Second, it’s not about prioritizing, it’s about how I want to see things. I still make intuitive choices, but I’m not relying solely on my intuition in the moment. I’ve preserved some of my earlier thinking of what a project or next action means to me. Finally, consider the standard recommendation for time-sensitive actions and projects: put items with deadlines on your calendar. This is essentially having a time-sensitive category for your projects and next actions which lives outside of context lists. What I do is more flexible, gives me advance notice of upcoming due dates, and I do have contexts for all those next actions.

If you feel like your system is working well for you, that’s good. When things do not seem to be going well, it can be surprisingly difficult to figure out why. Subtle changes to a good, functioning system can have a big impact. If you feel that you are growing and learning, that is probably the best sign you are headed in a good direction.

Thank you for this reply, it is very helpful.

Your reply and my further thinking about it have led me to conclude that those contexts of Timely, MIT and Opportunity are in fact true to the intention of GTD. David says that the context can be the "situation" needed to complete the action. For my own clarification, I looked up the definition of situation: "all of the facts, conditions, events that affect something at a particular time and a particular place". I think these contexts are a way for me to clarify and organize how I perceive the "situation".

I like how you said, "it’s not about prioritizing, it’s about how I want to see things". These contexts help me determine the "situation" or how I perceive the action. I also like how you say these contexts preserve my thinking about what these next actions mean to me. They are kind of like a tickler, to push things that need to be dealt with sooner to the front of the line.

I think there is a fundamental difference between the contexts of Timely, MIT and Opportunity and a daily prioritized task list "that you'll then have to rearrange or rewrite as things change" that David talks about. The items in these contexts do not to be frequently rearranged or re-written. Those contexts enable me to make a master list of my commitments that are organized in a way that allows me to make decisions efficiently about what to do in the moment. I still need to prioritize intuitively as I "do", but my thinking in terms of "situation" and "tickler" that I mentioned before have been preserved. This helps me to choose actions to do with greater ease.

So now I have contexts that work for me, and I see how they are true to the GTD intention of contexts, so thank you!

I hope I have expressed myself clearly.

 

[mcogilvie]

So now I have contexts that work for me, and I see how they are true to the GTD intention of contexts, so thank you!

I hope I have expressed myself clearly.

I think you are very clear, and I’m glad things are working well for you.

 

[fooddude]

I do not use a priority "context" Those go on my calendar. Context is specifically what i can do only at that place or that tool. ie: calls and texts are @phone. anything computer like i can do on phone or laptop goes on @computer. I keep things really simple. I see so many complicated systems, I wonder if they spend more time on the system than actually getting things done.

 

[mcogilvie]

I do not use a priority "context" Those go on my calendar. Context is specifically what i can do only at that place or that tool. ie: calls and texts are @phone. anything computer like i can do on phone or laptop goes on @computer. I keep things really simple. I see so many complicated systems, I wonder if they spend more time on the system than actually getting things done.

Actually, I agree with you. In some sense, I only have one list of active next actions. I can filter it by a few contexts: Anywhere, Computer, Home, Out, Waiting For, Spouse and Agendas. Pretty familiar, right? The difference is that this list is grouped in a way that I find helpful: most next actions are inside projects, and I see timely and important things near the top of the list to increase my awareness. I find that for me the cognitive load and maintenance time required is less than with other schemes.

 

[Sarahsuccess]

I do not use a priority "context" Those go on my calendar. Context is specifically what i can do only at that place or that tool. ie: calls and texts are @phone. anything computer like i can do on phone or laptop goes on @computer. I keep things really simple. I see so many complicated systems, I wonder if they spend more time on the system than actually getting things done.

I initially thought that Timely, MIT & Opportunity are priority setting contexts. However, I now think they are more like “situational” contexts. They preserve my thinking about what my actions mean to me, so it’s easier to make intuitive decisions about what to “do”, in the GTD sense of the word. They act more like a tickler, bringing things I want to see sooner to the forefront. Tickler is definitely a GTD tool. I think they are fundamentally different then the traditional practice of prioritizing. For me, using these three contexts makes my action list simpler to use.

I like the term “metadata” used by #mcogilvie & #HelenM. The Wikipedia definition is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself. That’s exactly what those 3 contexts do for me.

 

[bishblaize]

I personally try and avoid value judgements in my Next Actions like the phrase "important" because its too subjective. However I do think that Context is an area where where users should experiment and find what works for them. Especially for people with very operational jobs, where you can have a super long list of small tasks, there needs to be some way of breaking up your NA lists into manageable chunks. And tools/place doesn't work any more for many people, when 90% of their work is on a computer. So trying things out is worth it, even if you iterate through a few ideas that don't work at first.

 

[Matt_M]

This is an age-old question that comes down to personal preference and what works best for each individual given a number of factors. Ultimately, use whatever helps you and makes sense for you.

Minor aside, I think there's a definite danger into reading too much into the GTD book and interpreting it as a set of absolutes or as some kind of immutable set of ideas. It's a starting point, nothing more. A key principle of GTD is to adapt to what is current in your individual case and what helps you to get stuff off of your mind.

If you find that the recommended starting contexts don't work for you and/or don't make sense for you: don't use them. It's absolutely OK to not use them. Use what helps you the most. In fact, it's a wise idea to, at some appropriate frequency that's not too often but not too infrequent either, to re-evaluate your system's structure and tweak it as appropriate (i.e. clean & maintain the system in and of itself).

Using a "MIT" or "Important" context is fine if it helps you and gets things off of your mind. It's not anti-GTD or an anti-pattern in GTD. If it doesn't help you or becomes an unmaintainable mess, then re-evaluate, re-plan, and re-sort to get back on track.

Personally, I had over 1,200 items in my system relatively recently; I had to stop and streamline things. 900 of those items got put onto a list called "Backlog" because I know that I can never look at them ever again and be totally fine. If I ever get bored, interested, or whatever then I have a treasure trove of stuff to pull from. That means I only had less than 300 items to manage with around half of them being "Someday / Maybe" or "Waiting For". Therefore, I only had to truly organize around 150 items across a dozen or so contexts (i.e. around 10 or so items per list). That was all actually manageable and I only had to look at a handful of lists routinely, made my weekly reviews ALWAYS less than an hour for months now, and reduced my stress to basically none.

Be flexible and adaptable in approaching GTD, not rigid and dogmatic.

 

[Jared Caron]

Second, it’s not about prioritizing, it’s about how I want to see things.

This is a key point here. Whatever you call them, contexts are simply a tool to truncate your lists into a manageable number of options. I do think there is value in the physically limiting factors like tools, location, etc for contexts because they will always have some degree of relevance, though the specifics will evolve.

However, mental context matters too, and is an equally valid way to apply the principle.

I always encourage new folks to start with the suggestions in the book and "lean in hard" on them before venturing into customizing contexts. They have worked for a lot of people for a long time for good reasons. The goal is to deeply understand the method and the underlying principle.

It's like playing music - if you don't have a solid understanding of chords, keys, and scales, and first learn to play music as written, when you try to improvise it's going to sound... off .

Eventually, though, your GTD system will evolve and become unique to you and look very different than the "vanilla" setup described in the book. That's why its a "methodology" and not a "method".