[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by gazhayes

Perhaps sometime in the future Omni will add a multiple context per action feature, that would solve a whole heap of these problems in one fell swoop.

Much ado about nothing. Look, if GTD relied on having multiple contexts for an action, you would be able to quote DA on the necessity of writing out duplicate actions in multiple contexts. Just like choosing the next action to write out in a project where you might be able to do several, you just pick one.

Most likely outcome of such a feature is to encourage lazy thinking and keep people from coming to grips with the whole context notion in GTD.

@whpalmer4 For me, this approach will add in some uncertainty to the subconscious 'trust' of the system (and undermines the entire GTD philosophy). If I'm on my macbook and I don't have my ipad, I want to trust that everything I can do at that time can be easily seen when I view the macbook context. If there are other things that I *could* be doing but could be in any number of other contexts then there is not much point in having any contexts at all, I would still need to do a lot of mental work to check them all and I could not trust the system.

If you have an interesting amount of work to do, there's going to be more than you can do in a single session. The fact that you didn't have the opportunity to look at even more work that you could be doing which has no time pressure and thus no reason to be done before the work that you have before you is irrelevant. A concrete example: I've got a list of fix-it tasks for various things about the house. I've also got a similar list for things about the garage. If I'm at home, I can work on tasks from either list. I already know from my regular reviews whether any tasks on either list have urgency, and those will be done first. After that, it matters not a whit that I choose the next action from only one of those lists instead of the combined list. At such time as I completely drain one of the lists, I can go look at the other. Until that time, I'll be more focused, not less, if I look at a subset of possible actions.