[imlad]

Brian, I think what happens is that people find imperfect workarounds. The way I deal with the inability to have multiple contexts in the very situation that started this thread is to use the person's name prettiest with $ which is my convention for indicating an additional "person context." So, I create a search on $bob and save it as a Perspective named "Bob" and so, when I have a task that involves calling Bob, I create the task, make @phone the context and Type "Call $bob" in the title.

Thus, once I actually do call Bob, I can go to the $bob perspective and check to see if there was anything else relating to Bob I may want to bring up.

The workaround works with the caveat that I need to make sure I type the search identifier correctly, which I usually do, but would much rather select from a drop down list, as I would in the case of the Context, Project, or date, for that matter.

Based on the discussions in the various threads, and the personal conversations I have had with friends (let alone my personal experience) I really, really, really don't think this is an outlier case. I think the contrary is true.

OF is a great product, and the type of person that persists with it is most probably the type of person that requires the depth of functionality OF provides and actually takes advantage of said depth and said functionality. Some users would come up with the type of workaround to accommodate this very common need, but many others would not. Even for those who do, the workaround always feels like a workaround, a somewhat kludgy compromise.

By not providing a way to relatively easily (little flowers around relatively) categorize a task under more than one category, you are losing potential customers (that I know for certain - again, these are people I know who would not go for the product for this very reason), and probably some current customers as well.

Allowing access to user defined metadata would force intelligent usage (unlike tagging, which would be easy and probably relatively indiscriminate, achieving the opposite of the original intent of the user) since it would require setup and give someone the opportunity to think through his or process, as well as whether an additional category is REALLY necessary. Hand on heart guys, sometimes it is, and by giving it to the user base you would be offering a much better and more powerful product than you already do.