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Originally Posted by Ken Case
First off, thanks everyone for your discussion on this, and especially for providing some concrete examples of what you're trying to do!
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It's really encouraging to know that you guys are making note of this stuff because I think it is an important area that needs some improvement.
Since you are looking for concrete examples of how the current context hierarchy is less than useful sometimes I'll share one of my current head scratchers.
I have a very loose work schedule. I do work for a company and not myself but I pretty much set my own hours. The company has different shifts and the building is accessible by me 24 hours a day. I find that some things are best taken care of during the regular business day such as discussing an expense report with someone in the accounting department. Other tasks are better left for the evening when many people have gone home such as performing maintenance on the accounting department computers. Many tasks can of course be handled anytime I'm at the office.
So if I break these into contexts I get Work Day, Work Night, and Work General. Now what I would love to be able to do is click on one context and see everything that is currently available in that location. For instance, if I'm at the office and the sun is shining I'd like to be able to click on Work Day and see all of my available actions for being at work during the day. Unfortunately, right now that takes a multiple selection of contexts.
So what I'm looking for is contexts that include other contexts within them. That sounds like what is available with OF's nested context feature. Looking offhand at my three contexts above you might assume that the following hierarchy would make sense.
Work
--->Day
--->Night
But that provides for exactly the opposite of the functionality I'm looking for and in fact provides less functionality than the separate contexts themselves. If I select Day, I still only see what's available under Day and see none of the generally available Work items. If I now do a multiple selection of Work and Day as I did above, I see everything including Night tasks which I'm specifically trying to avoid.
I can regain some of the functionality I'm looking for if I reverse the hierarchy for one of my shifts.
Day
--->Work
Work Night
Now by clicking Day I get one of the inclusive views I'm looking for but now the Night items are left out in the cold and even worse, all general Work items now are visually categorized under a false taxonomy of Day items.
That is what I was getting at with my recommendation to take a look at the LifeBalance context inheritance model for which this kind of classification is easy. I guess you could solve this with Perspectives as well if they now respect both context and project selections, the last time I tried them they didn't yet, but it still seems less intuitive then just clicking on one context to see what's up. Maybe once Perspectives get a better UI (i.e. named and not just living in the menu bar) the differences may be moot.