Defining OmniFocus sub-contexts for computer-based work
 

The concept of [I]critical resource[/I], robustly helpful in identifying other kinds of GTD Context can look suddenly inadequate when the main requirement of most of our work appears to be a screen and keyboard.

In these cases, I personally find it helpful to turn the concept inside out, and reframe it as 'critical constraint'. When I'm working at a screen, what are the 'resources' that most [B]inhibit[/B] my work ?

For some tasks, for example, the resource that can be most usefully [B]eliminated[/B] turns out to be network connectivity. Fiction is not, as it happens, my thing, but [URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one"]Jonathan Franzen's words[/URL] still resonate:
[INDENT]"It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction" [/INDENT]
I am therefore naming and automatically restoring a set of different computing contexts, using [URL="http://getconcentrating.com/"]Concentrate[/URL] from [url]http://getconcentrating.com/[/url]

In some of these named contexts, the key element is that certain applications and forms of connectivity are [B]disabled[/B] rather than enabled. (Some of them, for example, launch [URL="http://macfreedom.com/"]Freedom for Mac[/URL] from [url]http://macfreedom.com/[/url]).

The names of the environments defined and saved by Concentrate match the names of the Mac sub-contexts which I use in OmniFocus. A draft [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=19548"]script[/URL] enables me to select a particular task/project in an OmniFocus window, and automatically launch the corresponding Concentrate 'activity', or computing context.

Once Concentrate has open/closed the specified set of applications, documents, connections, and web-sites, run any preparatory scripts, changed the desktop background etc, its timer is set either to a default for that environment, or to any [I]estimated minutes[/I] setting which the selected task happens to have.

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