Re-Engineered Contexts Worked AMAZING but looking for suggestions on some tweaks

[ivanjay205]

I am about to start my weekly review after my first week with a brand new set of contexts. As I mentioned previously the idea of computer, etc. was not working well for me anymore. I went with the following:

• Calls/Texts
• Focus Work
• Follow Up
• Hanging Around
• Home
• Office
• Quick Hits
• Quick Base Development
• Review
• Routines
• Shopping/Errands
• Strategize

I also separated my Someday/Maybe List into Business Someday/Maybe and Personal Someday/Maybe

First, replacing this list with my old ones made a HUGE difference. I found myself getting more done and most importantly my next actions were MUCH more distributed which was nice. I could engage with what I needed to at the right time. Now about to start my weekly review I paused for a minute to reflect on how it worked to try to see what I could do better.

Here are some thoughts to move forward and looking for feedback!

• Calls/Texts: This worked great. Pretty self-explanatory and going to leave as is
• Focus Work: This also worked great. This was for my deeper work that I needed more focus on.
• Follow Up: This one was a bit of a miss for me I think.... I struggled between this and Quick Hits. I am going to see what people think but I dont believe it is necessary and will most likely get rid of it and consolidate a tag. The intent was to have this medium level energy bucket of next actions where I dont want to do focus work, but I am not in full on lazy mode and I can get more accomplished. It feels in between to me.
• Hanging Around: This one I loved. I found myself at the end of the day where it is 30 minutes until wrap up time and instead of surfing the web I would pick off a few low hanging items. Same thing watching a show at night on the couch and maybe drop in to knock a few things off.
• Home: This tag might need some work. Right now it is obviously for anything when I am home. I have 15 next actions on it so they are manageable. But, build new shelving for my garage is in the same context as sort mail. They are just completely different mindsets so I think I might need to subdivide in the future but not yet.
• Office: Worked well, again not much on here as 90% of my work is computer based but it was nice to sort out the 2-3 that are office based.
• Quick Hits: This works very well. This was my goto when I have 10 minutes before my next meeting. Sometimes a bit of a difficulty on what is hanging around, follow up, or quick hits. I think by eliminating follow up I can simplify that and help that a bit.
• Quick Base Development: We have a Quickbase app for our ERP system I have developed. I created a separate context as I typically have a lot of work in this area. I placed any major development work in this context and any light quick thinks in quick hits. I found that I did not get to this context this week. And on one side I am not thrilled about that but it also presented the reality of the week so I think that works well.
• Review also did work out well. I prioritized a lot of the items in here since in my job function others depend on me reviewing so it helped me keep others moving much faster than I used to.
• Routines: I did not necessarily find this helpful but I have very few things in there. I am still on the fence on keeping routines or moving them into one of the other tags.
• Shopping/Errands self explanatory and worked well.
• Strategize.... This one too I am on the fence. I am thinking about merging with Focus Work. I will leave for this week. I think Strategize is a different mind set. However, I am not sure it is necessary to have separated and I did not get to it this week. So we will see how next week goes!

Looking forward to hearing feedback!

 

[bishblaize]

These are definitely advanced contexts and would only work for people well-versed in GTD, which also means they're going to be very idiosyncratic. Looking through they broadly seem to be split across a few categories of context

Location - Office, home,
Mood - Focus work, hanging around
Tool - QuickBase, Calls
Activity type - Review, Strategise
Time - Quick hits

I guess the issue you might face is that you could have Next Actions that fit into multiple categories. For example, if texting someone is both a Call/Text and a Quick Hit, where does it live?

Looking at them again, I wonder if some of them are proxies for duration and/or energy? Quick hits, Hanging Around, Focus Work seems to go from quick and easy through to longer, more involved actions.

Maybe you could have two tags on your NAs, one for location/activity type/tool, then one for mood and/or one for time. Obviously, there are downsides to more than one tag (time taken to process, double entries in lists) so it's not ideal. But the plus side is that if you're looking for a quick hit, it'll pull them out from all your other contexts.

 

[ivanjay205]

These are definitely advanced contexts and would only work for people well-versed in GTD, which also means they're going to be very idiosyncratic. Looking through they broadly seem to be split across a few categories of context

Location - Office, home,
Mood - Focus work, hanging around
Tool - QuickBase, Calls
Activity type - Review, Strategise
Time - Quick hits

I guess the issue you might face is that you could have Next Actions that fit into multiple categories. For example, if texting someone is both a Call/Text and a Quick Hit, where does it live?

Looking at them again, I wonder if some of them are proxies for duration and/or energy? Quick hits, Hanging Around, Focus Work seems to go from quick and easy through to longer, more involved actions.

Maybe you could have two tags on your NAs, one for location/activity type/tool, then one for mood and/or one for time. Obviously, there are downsides to more than one tag (time taken to process, double entries in lists) so it's not ideal. But the plus side is that if you're looking for a quick hit, it'll pull them out from all your other contexts.

Appreciate the feedback! Yes, although constantly learning I would be pretty confident in saying I am pretty well-versed. Took a lot of years of refinement to realize I needed to do something like this.

I would completely agree that there is some concern about things falling into multiple categories. hence why I am getting rid of Follow Up already. That one has had that issue A LOT with Quick Hits. Almost all of them are proxies for duration and energy as you mention with a slight hit on context where I have to be in a certain environment/physical place to complete some activities. What I have tried to do is define for myself where things go to minimize the opportunity for multiple tagging. Specifically to your point on Call/Text and Quick Hit.... So to me a call is not a quick hit because I cannot control the length of time something on the phone. And on a text I want to have enough time for a conversation. How many times have you made a quick call before a meeting and all of a sudden it goes on 15 minutes and you're late? So to me a call is a specific context that I try to flush out before the others. But I can do them anywhere, even the car while driving.

In Omnifocus which is what I use, I can use multiple tags but the perspectives get complicated. What I like about this is I can work within one context at a time and just plow through NA's in them. I used to have a different tag for energy and that never worked well for me. But for example right now I am off work today, on the couch watching the tv and doing some side NA's in my Hanging Around context.