The perennial context lists question...

[ianfh10]

At the risk of rehashing old ground, I was wondering if anyone had success organising their context list by some other means other than place or tool?

I love contexts for my next actions. It was that one big 'aha!' moment for me while reading the book; I cou;ldn't believe something so simple and elegant was so uncommon. They work well for my personal life - home, computer, garden, phone, errands suit my needs. I know some people approach their next actions by project, or use tags or such to see actions in both context and project. Tagging is too much overhead for me. I also don't want to see action by project because I'd have to re-review all actions to find something I can do given context/time/energy/priority.

However, when it comes to work, I'm struggling to make them work for me, because my contexts and tools are ambiguous or somewhat amorphous. For context, I'm an analyst (not quite a software developer) in healthcare IT where I'm on a team responsible for the maintenance and build of an EPR (electronic patient record). There's an element of corporate work to this, with the usual meetings, administrative work, Teams, email etc etc, combined with elements of deep, focused work in both our software and in terms of writing training materials for end users.

I have tried splitting my context lists out by tool or website (email, Teams, software environment 1, software environment 2, online knowledge base tool, end user ticketing system, etc etc) which is okay, but I feel could be better (it doesn't feel as frictionless as my personal context lists), I think mainly because there aren't hard edges to these tools/contexts - they're all done at computer (home or office doesn't make a difference) and they're not that different from one another that it really makes a difference. I tried a 'computer' list but the 80+ items repulsed me.

For context I'm using MS To Do as my list manager - I'm not a fan of tagging, adding priority tags, due dates etc because I know that kind of maintenance is off-putting to me.

I know there's been a lot of discussion recently around context lists in our digital age, and that some don't even use them. I think i'd still find them useful, but would love to see if others have managed to somehow further categorise their context lists in new or interesting ways. I think time and energy would be useful aspects to factor in, but struggling to conceptualise what this would look like.

I know GTD is supposed to be 'whatever works for you to get it off your mind, but if you're using context lists that take into account time, energy, priority or some other criteria, or are making amorphous contexts somehow more concrete, I'd really appreciate a look into some practical examples.

 

[cfoley]

When working from your 80+ item list, do you ever notice that you avoid certain items because you are in a different mode? You could try logging this information for a while. Write down what item you avoided, and what sort of thing you were doing previously. This information might suggest some contexts to you.

 

[Lucas W.]

Instead of tags you can try to add a time dimension prefix to the topic and sort your list alphabetically.


10 – check my IT helpdesk query…

20 – ask HR about…

45 – review the report…


I do it for my @PC list in Outlook. But you can adopt it for To Do as well.

I would be careful with optimizing the contexts - being meticulous at this point have never improved my workflow. In the other hand if you want to mange 80 next actions on your PC then you have to be meticulous.

Personally I try to keep a dozen or so items on my @PC list but also being aware of the time dimension. If there is 30h total then it means that I will never do most of those tasks – after all I have got meetings, new ideas and new problems to solve each day.

This is just my impression so please do not mind – but maybe your answer is in higher horizons and weekly review.

 

[TruthWK]

The thing that has worked for me is that I don't think of my lists as just Active Projects, Next Actions and Someday/Maybe. This will be a long explanation but stick with me. I realized that these list names were simplifying what was actually where prioritization does fit into GTD. For me, it gave me clarity to make the priorities more explicit.

Very few people have only what I would call 1 horizon of Someday/Maybe lists. We all have things that we know are far out in the future or at the speculative dream level and things that are not quite ready to be started but we'd think of as Soon. There are two dimensions to this. How someday is it? In other words, how far out into the future is this roughly in my head. The other dimension: How maybe is it? Is this something I'm certain is coming up like something you'd put on a tickler list for a set date or is it something I may never do like a cool vacation that I may never be able to afford. In practice, the further out something is in the future, the more speculative and maybe it is also because in reality, you don't know if it will really happen. Likewise, I'd review them at the same frequency. This scale is what I think of as priority in the someday/maybe world.

Setting that aside for the moment, let's look at actionable things. I found in my life that actionable items typically fit into 2 priorities. There's active and urgent. I don't thrown in arbitrary dates into my system but the idea of them being there helps to explain active vs urgent. Both have a start date that is in the past. This is because they are active and not someday/maybe, which would be a start date in the future. However, urgent tasks have a due date in my head even if I don't think of it as a set date but just rather a rough sense of urgency I feel.

From the Inbox, if something is reference or trash, then that gets tossed or filed. However, everything else first gets assigned a priority level. You can use names or numbers. Whatever works for you. I use numbers because I will adjust how many levels of someday/maybe priorities I have depending on how full they are. Even if I haven't fully processed something, I can generally get an idea of its priority. Things that aren't active, don't really need fully processed anyways, so that saves me time if my inbox is super full. I don't spend a bunch of time thinking about low priority things that I won't get to for a while anyway and may change by the time I do.

One thing to remember is that priority isn't traditional priority. It's still the GTD version. I've just fleshed out some of the lists to work for me. So something simple like buying cat food or cleaning the house is not "less important" than some big work project. It just depends on what you want/need to do now. Also, there is no reason to try and contrive context lists that aren't meaningful. The reason to have 5 priorities in my case vs the plain Active and Someday/Maybe lists is so that I can be super picky about what is considered Active and Urgent.

I have 3 contexts for personal and 1 for work because my top 2 priorities (the active ones) wouldn't contain more than 10-15 projects at the most total between the two. That's less than most people keep active but I have found that the fewer contexts that you genuinely have, the fewer active projects and next actions you should have. Because if you usually have the option to do pretty much anything, then you need to limit the options you see on the front end to fewer so that when you look at your lists, you're not looking at 80+ next actions.

Other people have tried to do time or energy lists or other things. I'll always say that this is all based on my life and experience, but those things were too vague to work for me. Energy can be mental or physical and doesn't reflect in the moment motivation that may give me a lot of energy for one task but little for another. Time never made sense to me as a context list unless you only have mostly small chunks of time to work off your lists. For most people that don't, you wouldn't filter things out very much if you have 2 hours free and 80 next actions. Also, I'm not with David Allen on taking advantage of all the little chunks of time I do have. I don't want to try to squeeze in a 5 or 10 minute task while I'm waiting for something or in between meetings or whatever. I want to use those as breaks.

The gotcha for me was that having a million items on different someday/maybe lists ignored the fact that I needed to review them at very different intervals. Also, when I finished a project, I only needed to look at Priority 3 (Soon) items for something to make active. Spending time every week reviewing Priority 4 and lower items didn't make sense. While this is clearly the measure of priority that fits into the GTD system, what I'm really doing here is making a concrete version of what lots of different GTDers do ad hoc. I've seen plenty of posts and heard podcasts of people creating Soon lists or Urgent lists or trying to narrow down the active projects to just what could be done in a week. This just does all of that in a straightforward horizon-like idea of priority lists where I can have as few contexts as what represent my life while limiting the number of active projects and next actions and feeling good about how often I needed to review each priority of someday/maybe so that I could feel good about making lots of projects not active. Hope that helps.

 

[Broomscot]

do you ever notice that you avoid certain items because you are in a different mode?

I agree with this approach and it is what I used when I first set up my system a few months ago. I think of my contexts as being emergent rather than externally imposed, so my focus when choosing them was my workflow and what was going on in my head when I looked at my list. Initially, I started with a single 'Anytime' list and put everything on it. Because I don't separate work and non-work, the first thing I noticed was that I'd be working at my desk and would see a maintenance or gardening item that required me to go outdoors. I didn't want to get up from my desk and go outside, especially if the weather was inclement, so I transferred all of the outdoor next actions to an 'Outdoor' list. However, I keep at-desk and non-desk items on the same list because I might pick an item like 'wash dishes' because I think I've been sitting at the computer too long, and having them on the same list reminds me that that's an option.

I review my Next Action lists throughout the day, and I had one particular project that I wanted to keep in the front of my mind, even though there was no current next action. So I added a list for that project. It makes no sense in relation to strict GTD organisation, but it fulfils an important GTD principle because it puts the list where I want to see it, and therefore gets it off my mind.

So my recommendation is to start with everything on one list and allow the organisation of the list to emerge from your workflow and thinking process. Hope this helps!