Hi Lisa, I wouldn't get too hung up on Contexts as certain other GTD concepts are probably even more important (Weekly Reviews, Next Actions, Mastering Work Flow, Project Lists, etc.) I also have a iPhone and a netbook computer (very light and long battery life) with full internet access wherever I go so I don't need very many contexts either. Errands and Calls are two contexts that are helpful to me; errands for the obvious reason and calls because I tend to batch process most of my calls together as Mark Forster in "Do it Tomorrow" suggested. My home office context gets most of my tasks because computer, calls, and internet are all included contexts of my home office. As such, my home office context can get somewhat unmanageable at times.
I usually always assign a context to a Project or Parent task for the sole reason of inheriting the context. I used to make every parent task a project, but I stopped doing that once I started using the Projects view in Outline as my GTD Projects List. If you are indiscriminate about assigning Project status to a task, your Project view in Outline mode becomes pretty useless as I had way too many projects in it. I now only assign a parent task project status to the lowest level (deeply nested) parent that I possibly can. This gives me a much more manageable Projects List. I have kludged Project Status until Andrey provides us with the ability to customize the Project Status parameter. I use In Progress for current or active projects; Suspended is for my Someday/Maybe projects; Completed for completed projects; and Not Started is for projects I have not yet assigned a status. That is, If I find any project in the Project View Outline mode that has a status of Not Started, I assign it one of the other 3 Project Statuses. This is the least elegant part of my GTD implementation, but will have to do until Andrey allows us to customize this field. For the pie of tasks that don't fit under a project, I use Single Step Actions root level parent (see GTD4Zoom template, I think). The Single Step Actions root level parent has my Contexts under it. When I am in the Collection phase of Work Flow, I typically use RTE to pop things into my MLO inbox as I think of them. Later on when I am ready to process these items collected in my MLO inbox, I process them by dragging and dropping them in the appropriate spot in my Outline. For example, if mow the lawn was in my inbox, I would drop it onto my Home subtask directly under Single Step Actions, and this would give it automatically my @Home context. So all of my tasks are either assigned to a project or to a specific context under Single Step Actions. For routine things I actually have assigned Contexts for Morning, Mid- Day, Afternoon, Early Evening, Late Evening routines as per the GTD4Zoom template. All of these routines feed into (are included in) a Dashboard context. Keeping these routines in MLO might be a bit anal retentive, but I find it keeps me focused and on-track throughout the day. For example, batch processing phone calls, processing my inbox, batch processing email, and even lunch (I have reminder set for lunch as sometimes I can sail right through it if I am engrossed in what I am doing) are just examples of what might fall into a routine context. I even have a batch process for my @Office context tasks. When I reach this task in my Dashboard view, I go to my @Context view and start to make it happen! I actually schedule time on my calendar for Weekly Planning and Review on Sunday. Before I get to my Weekly Review, let's first talk about Goals. Coincident with the start of each calendar year, I sit down and list 4 to 6 BIG goals that I intend to accomplish in the upcoming year. I also assign at least one Monthly goal for each Yearly Goal, and at least one Weekly Goal for each Monthly Goal. As the week progresses, I work on my tasks that are related to my Weekly Goals and other non-goals. I rarely do any planning or reviewing between Weekly Reviews as I am entirely focused on executing the plan during the week. MLO does a superb job in supporting the execution of my plan as it gives me my next actions by context with Weekly Goal subtasks sorted to the top of my Context lists. My next Weekly Review I decide on the next week's Weekly Goals that will help me move on my Monthly Goal objectives. I have mentioned this before but it is critical during the Weekly Review to be brutally honest with yourself in what you can and are willing to do in the upcoming week. Here is where anything I am not committed to working on within the next week gets a "Hide the branch in To-do" check. I find it much easier to limit what is going on my Contexts list rather than trying to somehow manage (sort, categorize, flag, etc.) my Context view because I have let too many tasks find their way on to my Context lists. I would not be so willing to hide a task from the To-Do view if I didn't think I would be doing my Weekly Review in a week! If I am performing my Weekly Reviews in periodic, regular intervals, I am much more comfortable in hiding tasks from the To-Do because I know I will be re-evaluating that status in just a week's time. The GTD methodology provides in the Do phase of Work Flow to choose a task based on its context, the time you have, the energy you have, and the priority of the task (not necessarily in that order). Andrey appears to have taken these into account with Task Effort (energy?) and Time required for the task. I have not used these fields because I quite frankly think that there would be more cost than benefit to me in trying to implement these features. If you find a way to incorporate these fields into your implementation of GTD, I would be very interested in hearing from you on this. For now, just having my Weekly Goal subtasks appearing at the top of my Context lists seems to be doing OK for me as I keep working on these tasks each day along with the other stuff that pops up out of nowhere (MLO 3.5 Beta!). I hope you find at least one good idea in this GTD regurgitation of mine. Best of luck, Ron On Jan 28, 5:33 pm, Lisa Stroyan <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi GTDers, > > First, I do appreciate and having been processing the answers you > gave to my last set of questions....I still have a lot of work to do > and I keep going back to those emails. But all of this fun technical > discussion is getting me motivated to update my GTD system, so now I > have some "implementation" questions: > > I'm in the process of simplifying my contexts and slicing my tasklist > in other ways (using Goals, and moving things to hidden views that > aren't goals for this year), because my complicated Contexts were > getting in the way. I have some questions for those of you following GTD: > > - What MLO context, if any, do you assign to Projects? Since they > aren't actionable, they don't really have a true "Context". However, > the actionable tasks (when I get around to breaking down the project) > will inherit the context; is that reason enough to put one on? Do > you use Contexts in any other interesting ways? (I don't need it for > Area of focus - I use TopLevelParent for that). > > Second, I can't figure out a good way to split up the pie of tasks > that is left. Most of them are at home (with a phone and a > computer). My phone and computer go with me most places I go. As a > working from home, loosely homeschooling mom with my fingers in way > too many pies, my life seems to be divided into these categories: > > - The many, many routine things needed to keep everything going (I > have a context I add called Routine so I can filter these in or out) > - Reactive communication and tasks to keep various things moving - > mostly through email (I do these each morning and throughout the day > - most are not worth adding into MLO) > - Tasks that I can pick off or make slow progress on in between > helping my son, answering requests, etc > - Larger tasks (including planning, reviewing, etc) that fall through > the cracks because there are a lot more of them than my "free" blocks > of time available, and I often don't have the energy to do them > during the times I have "down time". > > I'm thinking somehow I need to be able to encode whether something is > going to take a lot of energy or not, and whether it needs to be done > without interruptions, or not, into my system, and then force myself > to work on those tasks when I have the right energy and time to focus > (instead of doing the other 3 categories during those times, and > "wasting" them. > > I don't really like using the sliders in MLO for this kind of thing, > for some reason. That's why I'm considering Contexts. And in a > sense, it *is* a Context - it's a special "place" in my head that I'm > able to do those tasks. > > Any ideas? > > Thanks! > > Lisa > > ---------- > Lisa Stroyan, mailto:[email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en.
