My GTD contexts

Sunset at 10,000 feet - mynd eftir fearoflanding
I think it is fair to say that I like patterns and systems (referring to the abstract concept of a system). Getting Things Done (or GTD by David Allen) is one of the systems that I feel complements my thinking/behavior and therefore I’ve been following some of its principles for 3-4 years. Here are a few of its principles:

  • Collect everything (goals, wants, needs, commitments etc) into a single system.
  • Organize them by project.
  • Discover the next action to move the projects forward.
  • Group the actions by context.
  • Do stuff.
  • Review your system weekly.
  • etc.

Anyways, I am not writing this to evangelize GTD, I know that productivity porn is not for everyone. Actually, unless you know and perhaps use GTD, you may not get much from this post.

The context problem Link to heading

I’ve been using the system for while now, but a facet of GTD has never gelled with me and that is “Contexts”. According to GTD, you create contexts for a physical or mental situation that you commonly do work in and group tasks together by their context. Having done this you now can be more productive by doing a lot of tasks from different projects without switching your context. A popular example is the “Phone” context. One would have a “Phone” context so that one could do a lot of telephone actions in one fell swoop regardless of the project.
This makes sense but I’ve come to the conclusion that me and out-of-the-box contexts simply are a bad fit.

The scope problem Link to heading

My system of preference to manage my actions is OmniFocus. A nice GTD oriented system that syncs between my computer, my tablet and my mobile phone, but let’s not wander off topic into software evangelism land. Since doing weekly, monthly etc. reviews more consistently I’ve felt that OmniFocus did not help me deal properly with different scopes of things I want to do. “Take out the trash”, “Read Foundation” and “Pay up my student loan” are examples of three things I might like to do, but in regards to priority and the time I can expect them to take, they are wildly different. So when doing my regular reviews,I’ve been wanting to separate the important from the routine.

The solution Link to heading

There seems to be a correlation with the amount of time I am willing to invest in something and its importance to me. Who would have guessed that? So when mentioned to me by my wife the solution seemed obvious. I simply throw away all my unused contexts (computer, car etc.) and replace them with time units. These units of time (day, week, month, etc.) can then be used like buckets for tasks. To use the previous examples: “Take out the trash” goes in the day context, “Read Foundation” takes more than a week and less than a month so I’d choose the month context and “Pay up my student loan” takes more than a year so it gets the years context.
So when doing my regular reviews and beyond, I can now recall a list of stuff that goes beyond a day or a week or a month with a single click/touch. In regards to the “different levels of focus” in GTD (10-50.000 feet) one could see this as the zoom function in Google Maps.
So now, obviously, my productive life is filled with bliss.