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Multiple contexts
It’s great to see how far kGTD has come since I first commented on the matter of recurring events. I’m now doing partial imports and tests with live data from my current system with almost every release of kGTD. I’m eager to make the transition, but it’s not quite there yet.
One issue relates to contexts. When I started applying GTD to my workflow last year (and progressively more thereafter), one of the first things I tweaked was how I handle contexts. Basically, I use multiple necessary contexts and multiple sufficient contexts.
A simplified example of multiple necessary contexts: I have the contexts @home, @work, @phone. So, I might flag a task as “@home + @phone”. Then I have a predefined search that shows me tasks have BOTH of those contexts. Yes, I know I could conflate these up front with @homephone and @workphone, but that get really ridiculous when you add a few more of these ‘atomic’ contexts to the equation.
And here is a simplified example of multiple sufficient contexts: I have agenda contexts for all my work colleagues and clients. I might mark a task as “@Agenda:Lori or @Agenda:Roxie”. They both work for the same client and I could take on this task with either of them, whenever we next talk.
You see what I’m getting at here? Does anyone else do this? It’s definitely been worth it to me. I could adapt to not having it, I guess, but I would rather not have to.
mcg- Something like this
mcg-
Something like this would be possible in kGTD if I changed the way contexts are entered. The current drop down method trades off mutliple contexts for the “convenience” of the drop down assignment (this is more convenient if you are on contexts without the @ prefix since you can select then with just a couple keystrokes).
If I did something like free text tagging of contexts (also possible) then you could have multiple contexts per item, though there would be some possible negatives in terms of misspellings and more typing.
It would probably entail a lot of rewriting so my inclination is to stick with the current system. Nonetheless, I’d still encourage others to comment on this.
I know that David Allen does speak to this in GTD when he says that if you have a context that is a guaranteed “subset” of another context, you should just use the “superset” context in the interest of “fewer buckets”.
I agree that you should stay away from workphone and such unless you really have a lot of items that are calls you can only make from work. I tend to just stick these into @calls (sans @ of course ;)
I like single contexts for the most part because it keeps everything pretty simple and straightforward for me. Anyone else want to chime in on their use of single vs multiple contexts?
Free tagging with autocomplete?
I can see some of the challenges that you describe. Furthermore, I am strictly an amateur programmer and don’t really know what lies underneath your work or how it needs to be optimized. But I can say that from my own perspective as a user, I would far prefer multiple contexts using free tagging supported by autocomplete. It would be very slick.
But maybe not workable or fun to develop?
— Michael
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Sorry admin,i tested your blog:)
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I'd like multiple contexts
I’d love to have free-flow tagging (like del.icio.us) instead of drop-down pre-defined contexts. I don’t find it convinent at all. In fact, I often have to go and create new contexts which is a pain.
The problem I see is with iCal sync. Right now, every time I create a new context I also have to go and create a new entry in the sync options to also sync that context to iCal. This is even more of a pain than creating the contexts in the first place - and if you made it easier to create new and multiple contexts then this part would become nearly impossible.
I’ve been thinking of a solution which might solve both these problems, but frankly I’m stumped.
Sorry admin,i tested your blog:)
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ringtones
ringtones Very nice article :)
I definitely would LOVE a
I definitely would LOVE a del.icio.us tagging style context adding.
To get over potential misspellings, there should be an easy way to merge a misspelled context into the correct version. It will be easy to spot them in the context list. To really ease things you could offer auto-complete (is that even possible?).
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