[KeithFK]

I am new to GTD, OF, and to this forum. Although I have read through much of this thread, I may have missed something. I'll keep reading, but I would be very appreciative for any comments/suggestions you might have based on my comments and questions below.

My understanding of OF and GTD is that one (1) collects things to be done, (2) plans to do them, and then (3) does them, with OF facilitating key parts of the entire process. But the point of the whole thing lies in the doing. The problem that I've encountered early on, and that leads me to think of using multiple contexts (which led me to this thread), is that I would like to request to-do information from OF in ways that are helpful to me (see next paragraph). Maybe there is a good way to do this that I didn't yet find or figure out. If so, I would very much appreciate any hints.

This weekend I wanted to generate a perspective - or multiple perspectives - of all of things that I needed to do, sorted by context - what phone calls do I need to make, what emails to send, what errands to do, etc. Also, I can easily imagine that I might want a perspective that shows me all of the phone calls that I need to make today for any or all projects that I choose. Or, I might want to generate a perspective that shows me all of the various critical appointments (medical, dental, school, etc.) that are planned for the kids and pets over the next three months. Those things seem to me to indicate multiple contexts and/or some other flexible tagging (keyword) mechanism. Am I missing something that is already there?

I've seen some reference to nesting on this thread. My experience with other information management tasks is that nesting - and having been a long-time DOS-then-Windows user until ~2yrs. ago, I got into that habit - is not a good idea. Before long, it leads to an inefficient amount of time spent managing the information. It seems like the point of the GTD system (and any good database) is to do a small to modest amount of managing information that supports a large amount of accomplishing tasks (that is, finding information in timely and useful ways). The best way to do that in task planning, I suspect, is to have the ability to attach multiple labels of some sort to a task - so that you can retrieve it with a search (perspective) that either singles it out or groups it with a bunch of like tasks - all of the things that I need to do on a certain date or in a defined time period; all of the personal phone calls that I need to make this weekend; all of the errands that I need to do this week; all of the emails that I need to send out for 3 particular projects; etc. If I do a good job of assigning properties - genre (i.e. work, home, kids, volunteer, etc.), project name, context, due dates, other "keywords", etc. - then I should be able to generate the perspectives that help me get my work done efficiently. And, it doesn't seem to me that the properties of a task need to be thought of as being part of a hierarchy - which is the thinking implicit in the nesting idea.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have for me,

Keith