Paola52;87701 said:
Jukka,
"not possible" means never for me. My day is full of incoming calls and people. When there's 1 hour before the next meeting I would prefer to do the most important action across all the contexts instead of bunch of lower priority stuff. If the most important action is to fix the door to ensure my kids security then I will change the context to do it. And you would prefer to make 12 five lower priority actions instead?
What is the plus of doing low priority stuff for one hour when you can change the context and do something of more value for you?
Here is I how I look at it. All your next actions are the actions that you have decided to get done anyway so it doesn't really matter which actions you do and in which order as long as they all get done.
So following this logic it doesn't make sense to waste time by switching contexts to do actions as long as they are about the same priority and don't have deadlines.
However it is not how I work either, so let me explain
I personaly don't use contexts much and instead I sort by area of focus most of the time. Every project gets labeled as a certain area of focus(work,personal,etc) and then I can filter next actions by this label(so I will see next actions only from work related projects and all work related single actions too for example).
I work online and most actions have online context so when I want to do work I will filter by work area of focus and when I want to do personal I will filter by personal area of focus.
It doesn't make sense for me to do all my online actions in a batch because the list is kinda endless and I can basically spend all day online.
Also it doesn't make sense to have separate contexts for online-work and online-personal, online-whatever because they are not real contexts and it just generates more lists to check and it's pointless because as long as I have access to internet I can do any online actions.
I still have contexts and use them the way they are suposed to: like errands, agendas, home and etc I just don't find them very useful since most of the time I'm not limited by context and I can do anything anyway. I also might assign a focus context sometimes to certain actions, it kinda generates a most important to do list based on the whole gtd system and it is not a real context. But I don't use it often either.
So basically I can choose to see all my next actions or to filter next actions by contexts or by area of focus and
I can look at my focus list or I can even just look at only one single project. It depends on real life circumstances and what I want to see.
The goal is tweak your gtd system so that it suits your needs and helps you personally... It is going to be different for different life/work styles. I can see how context could be very useful for a person who switches locations a lot and has to do different things at different locations, but if you're not limited by context most of the time then that makes them a lot less useful
Paola52;87669 said:
When I sorted them by contexts then it just prevented me from choosing the most important one. I had to do double job looking through different contexts for the most important next action to do next.
Am I doing something wrong?
if you're not limited by context then don't filter by context.
Filter by context only when you are actually limited by context or want to do actions only from certain context, does this make sense?
In short - Context is important but it doesn't have to be the only one single criteria for filtering actions. Even though DA in his book kinda emphasises heavily on it
And to answer the thread title quesion "What is the purpose of contexts?"
There are two purposes behind a context: limitation (I can only do X in/with Y) and batch processing (it's easier to make 3 calls in a row).