tominperu said:
You are really selling Life Balance hard here!
In Outlook, I've got used to being able to see all my Tasks together but grouped together in Categories/Contexts. Having to click from context to context to see all the tasks I find really annoying athough I do it happily on the Palm because obviously the screen is smaller. It sounds petty but its the way Im used to working. I can then decide what I want to do that day or morning or whatever and mark them as high priority. Then I can then filter out all but these priority items and then print these out for the day. It's just a great thing to be able to do and I'll probably miss that with Life Balance. (I often go into central Lima and don't want to carry a Palm as I'd just be asking to be robbed)
I'm not trying to sell Life Balance hard; it has its drawbacks. But it does what you initially asked for on this thread, elegantly, and it is easier to use than one might initially think.
If I understand correctly, you like to see a list of ALL your Tasks (NAs), sorted by context. Now, while this is outside the use of contexts as presented in GTD,
I like your comprehensive list also. I don't think it's "petty" at all.
I do something similar with Life Balance most mornings. In LB, contexts ("places") can include other places. A built-in context "All Places" will show you a comprehensive list of every (non-post-dated) leaf in the outline, i.e., NA. However, I have made a more customized context called "!All Actions" that includes all the action places @Home, @Errands, @Computer, @Office, etc. That gives me the comprehensive list similar to the one you describe.
However, my list is sorted by priority, not by context. But I find this is preferable. I don't have to figure out the priority of everything myself. Most mornings, I look at this list of everything I have to do, from approximately most important to least important. Generally, the first 10 items on the list (1 screen on my little Clie) are the high-priority tasks I want to get done today. I can scroll down the list, and as each task is selected, its context appears to the right in the task's properties pane. So I have that information too.
The trick is to get the priority algorithm working for you. To get this, in a nutshell --
1) Keep the importance setting for every item set to a default of "Essential" (100%)
2) For tasks that have due dates, set the correct due date and an accurate lead time (how far before the due date you want to see the item on your list).
3) For projects that have due dates, but the individual actions to complete it do not, set the due date and lead time at the level of the parent project BUT NOT for the individual next-action children underneath it. Set those to "once."
4) For projects or actions without a true due date, do not set one; schedule it to happen "Once."
5) The exceptions are projects/actions that do not have an explicit due date but become less and less valuable as time passes, like sending thank-you notes. For thank-yous, for example, I set a semi-arbitrary due date of one week and put that due date in Life Balance. I can always skip over it in the ToDo list if I absolutely have to, but if I set no due date, the many items with explicit due dates keep trampling it down.
But to get back to the portability issue -- according to my memory, you wanted something that would filter postdated tasks on the Palm, for portability. If you prefer to resolve the portability issue by printing a list generated with Outlook, and you're perfectly happy with it, then there you go. I'm only saying that LB will do what you want, on the Palm.
