When I first wrote this entry I was using OF at both home and work, and was bugged by the behavior that when I Focused on a particular folder (e.g. Work), that Active Contexts which had no items from that Folder still showed up (because they had items from *other* folders, e.g. my Personal one).
It still bugs me.
The explanation given for this behavior was
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian
You could conceivably add an action to any context in the database - that's why we don't hide them. It's not safe to assume that because the projects you're working on don't include any actions for some context, that they will never include an action for that context. ("Active" means "this context could have actions, in other words.)
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And I basically left it at that. (Actually I abandoned the Work/Personal split for a while, trying contexts that were generic across both, but that didn't work either.)
But now (yes, a year later) I no longer buy the explanation.
The Active Contexts Filter doesn't show Stalled Contexts, or On Hold Contexts.
I might still want to add items to any of those Contexts.
But, more importantly, I'm in
Context mode. I'm not adding actions from this mode (at least, not generally). I'm
doing, and I should only see Contexts for which I can currently
do those items. If I'm Focused on a particular Folder, or Project, I should only see the Contexts for those Focused items.
I don't understand why this isn't the case, nor why it's not clear that it should be. After living with this behavior for a year, I can no longer see any logic behind it.
Here's my latest example that drove me over the edge:
I'm at work, Focused on my Work Folder. One of my projects is to hire a couple of people, and so I Focus on that. This project has several actions across multiple Contexts:
* Calls
* Emails
* Person A
* Person B
Those are the only Contexts I care about at this point, and yet I see two dozen Contexts in my list of Contexts. I had to scroll through those Contexts to find the four I cared about.
I know, I know: I can always just select the top level Contexts folder, and hide the sidebar, then group by Contexts. And that's a great workaround for missing behavior, but it feels like the workaround it is. I shouldn't see Contexts in the list of Contexts if they don't have items in them for this Focus.
Now, this may simply be a long-standing bug. After all, the Context Filter for "Stalled" is supposed to show only "contexts without any actions" (according to the Help), but I see most of my Contexts, with tons of actions listed, when using this Filter.
Can someone give an explanation behind the current behavior?