Designing GTD Contexts

What, you say? Designing GTD contexts? What’s wrong with the standard ones that David Allen mentions?

Well, David’s list is certainly a good one. Almost everyone can organize their tasks by contexts such as @Computer, @Errands, @Home, @Office, @Calls, and so on. But, the problem is that sometimes some of these context listings contain so many items that our eyes and our brains do not process the lists well.

To illustrate this, I’ll give you a non-GTD example, and then we’ll come back to the GTD aspect:

• If you run a Google search on “how to know if you have ADD,” you would find that I have an article on that ranks #1 in the Google search results. Cool, huh? That means I get a good bit of traffic off of that search.
• Now let’s say that you run a search on “Covey 1 Quadrant.” For that one, one of my articles comes up as #7 in the search results. Still on the first page of search results, though, so not too shabby.
• But, did you know that I would get more traffic on the latter search if it was ranked #10 instead of #7?

Interesting, isn’t it? The reason that #10 does better than #7 is that when we scan long lists, we typically have a blind spot for the “middle” items. The blind spot is not exactly in the middle, but you get the idea.

It turns out that I used this piece of research data in designing my list of popular items on the sidebar: instead of listing the 11 items in one long list, I grouped the data so that it is really a few shorter lists, not one list:

Anyway, back to GTD.

I made use of this principle long ago in designing my GTD contexts. I noticed that my @Home listing was large (15 to 20 items typically), and I noted that I would only do some of them when setting on my couch. So, I created an @Couch context. About half of my @Home items wound up there.

I also created an !Focus context. I wanted a way to blend the Covey style of addressing the “big rocks” with the GTD contexts. Basically, I knew there were some items that were “big rocks” for me, ones I wanted to ensure I accomplished during the week, irrespective of what context they might fall into. So, the !Focus context evolved from that.

You can probably take this information and run with it if you want to. But, I will give one more example, just to further stimulate your thinking on whether you have the right contexts. In this example, consider someone who is a mobile worker (perhaps that describes you). In a sense, you could probably lump together your @Calls, some of your @Computer, and even some of your @Office tasks into a category called @Mobile. But, as we have seen, the downside is that you could wind up with a long list of stuff in that context and you could overlook some tasks. Uncool.

So, what you might want to do instead is to look and see if there are some new categories that make sense in a mobile situation. Perhaps one called @Hotel.

That should illustrate the concepts. Hopefully you have found something herein you can use. And, perhaps you also have some additional thoughts to add, so please share them in the comments.