[sprugman]

I need a better way of distinguing projects & actions that I want to work on today, the next couple of days, this week or after that. Right now, my current context view shows ~45 items, which is way too many to choose from.

Contexts don't help very much because I work from home, so any choice I make about context would be arbitrary (e.g. for the next 30 minutes I'm only going to do things in the "Home" context). That's fine once I make that decision, but when I'm trying to decide where to place my focus, it's not very useful.

I have my projects foldered by area of life, so I can also focus on one of those, which helps, but again, it's only useful once I've made the decision about which area of life I want to be in at the moment, which would be somewhat arbitrary.

I want to be able to say to OF during a daily review, "these are the projects I want to work on today", "these can wait till tomorrow", these can wait till after that.

I'm currently using flags for those things I need or want to make progress on this week. I have been using durations as a kludge for priorities, with <30 min = today, <1hr = soon, and no duration = this week. It works ok, but I'd like to be able to use durations for durations. I use start dates for deferment, and on hold for even longer deferment. I suppose I could switch to a more aggressive start date strategy, and use flags for today/soon. That feels a bit fiddly, but probably less so than the duration kludge.

I guess there are some purists out there who would say that this kind of planning isn't really GTD, but, frankly, I don't care. :-) The lack of contextual restrictions in my life makes it necessary. How are you handling this issue?