International Mac Podcast

I haven’t talked to you guys about some of the ideas behind GTD in a while, so I think it’s time we rectify that. Last time we talked about Essentials, which was so long ago you wouldn’t remember this unless I brought it up, I promised I’d tell you about Areas of Responsibility. Truth is, there isn’t much to say and I said it all in my Things post. So today, I’ll be talking about Contexts. Next post I’ll get into another thing I’ve added to my personal GTD strategy which isn’t in David Allen’s, and that’s Mindsets.

Contexts are usually expressed as tags. That should tell you that they can apply to any task, project, or Area of Responsibility. Tasks in projects or areas will inherit their contexts, but projects and areas don’t inherit contexts from the tasks they contain. Tasks, projects, and areas can have any number of contexts, or none.

Now, what do contexts contain? First of all, usually they begin with the @ sign. This is not indicating a Twitter username, it means location, as in “Where are you at?” (in California they add “at” to the end of any location sentence, I don’t know why, and David Allen must be Californian, I guess). Are you at your house? desk? phone? Mac? Then you can do any task which requires your house, desk, phone, Mac, etc. Contexts are nouns. You don’t want to have to sort through all the tasks you can’t do before you see the ones you can, that just fills up your mental RAM again. (Read my first Essentials post if you don’t have any idea what that means.) So, when you’re cleaning out your inbox, tag every task with everything you need to complete it. Then when you’re working, filter out the tasks you can’t do. If your preferred GTD app supports Smart Folders, whatever their nomenclature, you can set up folders for the contexts you are usually in.

To separate my tasks from other tags, I use the @ sign. It’s not a requirement of contexts if you don’t need it, but it helps me distinguish between contexts and other tags. Some examples I have are @home for household chores, @internet which is obvious, @mic for recording, @things for tasks I sometimes use to tell myself to set up a project and list but don’t have time, and @errands, which is a parent tag in Things containing @post office and other stores. Contexts, unlike Twitter usernames, can contain more than one word, but the easier to type the better, unless you have autocomplete like Things does.

This ties in to the distraction subject. If you filter out the things you can’t do, you don’t get distracted by those you can’t. Contexts may be yet another thing that adds time to your processing, but they can pay off later, when you’re doing. However, as with any other part of GTD, if they aren’t helping stop using them, and you’ll regain the time you had been using.