While Ken's position makes sense, to me it would be better to be able to assign multiple contexts to a single action.
One example that is very common in my GTD implementation is to assign @waiting to tasks waiting for a reply. However, then when I have Joe on the phone, and pull up his context, I will miss the fact that I am waiting for Joe to reply to my earlier inquiry.
On the other hand, if I assign the task to @joe, it is not possible for me to check in on all of my waiting tasks during my weekly review.
If I could assign @waiting and @joe to a single action, my bases would be covered. This is certainly better than creating a separate task for each, as they are truly the same task, not different.
One very important asset we already have in OF is sub contexts. Doesn't handle the issue being discussed here, but I just wanted to mention it because this is a unique feature of OF contexts as far as I know.
Tags vs. multiple contexts is a little tricky for me. I believe that I would prefer taking OF contexts to the next level rather than introduce an additional feature to work around the lack of multiple contexts. John
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Case
It sounds like this task actually has two separate actions which you could complete independently, one which you would do in the @Bob context and another which you would do in the @Hardwarestore context. In OmniFocus, you would model this by breaking down the task into those two subtasks ("Talk with Bob about buying hardware item xyz @Bob" and "Buy hardware item xyz @Hardwarestore").
In OmniFocus, you can decide whether you need to talk with Bob before buying the item (by making the group sequential), or after, or both (by putting in two Bob actions), or neither (by making the group parallel). Or you could even check in with Bob every week until the entire project is done (by making the Bob action repeating). None of this flexibility or clarity is possible unless you actually break down the task into its individual actions.
I suspect that might be one reason that Things needs multiple tags: when you can't break down your work into individual actions (since Things has no support for subtasks), you end up with multi-step tasks which you need to be reminded of in multiple contexts.
Does that make sense? Or am I missing something about how multiple tags would be helpful for a single action?
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