Rethinking GTD Contexts
I recently read the article A Fresh Take On Contexts by Sven Fechner, a Twitter user that I used to follow (he stopped posting), on his blog, Simplicity Bliss. It’s an older article, posted in 2011.
Sven talked about the evolution of GTD both as a practice and from a system perspective. Where he lands, is that contexts have become somewhat ubiquitous in the past several years with online accessibility blending between home and work, and with contexts like “Computer” no longer meaning you’re at home using a desktop. His point is that whether you’re laying on the couch, sitting in your office, or waiting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, there’s a good chance you have access to the same computer-based tasks, as well as office and phone tasks.
He points out that David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) used four criteria (called dimensions by some systems) for selecting tasks to work on:
Context (availability of tools like phone, computer, internet connection, office)
Time (time you have at hand, e.g. before the next meeting starts)
Energy (the level of attention you can devote to the task)
Priority (if you still need to chose between tasks which one is most important)
This prompted Sven to reconsider how he was using contexts and change them instead to more of a time- and attention-based set of dimensions. For example, he uses contexts such as “short dashes” for his tasks that are quick hits, “brain dead” for something that requires minimal energy, and “full focus” for things that need dedicated focus and time. I already do something similar to the latter with a “deep thought” context.
Of course, there are still tasks that require the traditional contexts, such as Home (mowing the yard) or Office (doing something that physically requires being in the office, but most tasks (he says about 85%) are in his blended contexts now.
My New Approach
I was definitely able to blend contexts into smaller set for most of my tasks. I use folders to separate areas of focus, so even tasks with the Computer context are discernible between the Work, Personal and Home folders if needed, but it’s honestly never really necessary. My work company is so focused on being mobile-first that everything is accessible from a phone and it doesn’t matter where you are, when it is, or what kind of access you have. In general, I separate contexts by folder/project and then still use contexts, but a Computer context is much more helpful for me than an Office context if it actually requires internet access, and at that point, adding the Office context is pretty meaningless. I still have a couple of work-specific tags, such as Office for when I physically need to be in a company office and VPN for when I need to be on a VPN connection.
We’ll see how it goes for a while.
