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Another way to think about active contexts is in terms of time and day. In Life Balance, which I've used up to now, places (i.e., contexts) can be set to be open or closed (i.e., active or inactive) at certain times of the day and days of the week. For instance, my "office" place could be open 8 to 12 and 1 to 5, Monday to Thursday, and 9 to 4 on Friday. My "home" place could be open 6 to 10 on weekdays (because I don't want to do chores as soon as I get home). A simple checkbox allowed one, in the task list, to toggle between showing all places and showing only open places.

The idea behind this is that, if you wanted, instead of selecting a context yourself, you could have your software select the context you're likely to be in, based on time and day. A simple switch would turn it off, allowing you to select your own context manually. For those of us whose contexts are conceptual, not physical, it's a neat way to ensure that you don't work later than you want, or at least, that your other tasks begin to appear shortly before they become the relevant context. I might have a "research" context active weekdays from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. and a "teaching" context active from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., so that in the hour from 10 to 11, teaching tasks started to share space with research tasks on my next actions list.

That may be more than OmniFocus wants to be, but it might be nice in 2.0 or 3.0 to have the option.