08.09.06
Context Killer
So I took Merlin Mann’s advice to simplify my contexts and killed off a bunch of my useless ones today. I had over 20. Even subtracting a few that just weren’t ever used because they only existed because I was trying out some ideas that didn’t fly, that’s way too many. It turns out rather than separting them by what I could do I was separating them by what I wanted to do. This is exteremely bad, of course and no where near the point of having contexts.
I got so caught up in wanting to be sure I never saw a task I couldn’t or didn’t want to do that I became very skilled at hiding the things I really should be doing. Plus I could hide all the stale tasks I wasn’t working on, and wasn’t going to anytime soon. Stuff that really belonged in Someday/Maybe, or needed to get culled… really it was more like I had a half dozen Someday/Maybe contexts that weren’t serving any purpose.
I’m down to a 11, with a few more that will go away. I’ve split into three major ones Work (stuff I do for money), Hacking (stuff I do for fun), Chores (stuff I have to do at home) and Errands (stuff I need to do out and about). There’s a few other miscellaneous ones, like the one that depends on a specific computer with my music library before I can do work, but really this is much more managable.
My original thought was to schedule blocks of time to work in specific context. It was well-meaning, but wrong-headed. I don’t need to pick what context to work in, I need to know what context I’m already in and let my system filter it. I may need to ignore some tasks that I can’t do (say, “talk to so-and-so” and he’s out of the office) but that’s the price to pay to keep the whole list fresh. Also I’ve found that I end up scheduling project-specific time, rather than context-specific. It’s been working much better, the past few weeks I’ve been doing that.