Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4
A possible variation: keep the people all in one hierarchy, but insert another level in there.
Office
--Dell
--Fair Oaks
--SOB
People
--Office
----Robert
----Kelly
----Jim
--Teressa
You can put together a perspective that just selects the Office tree plus the Office sub-tree if you want to only view the stuff at the office. Of course you could also do that to see all the people in your current setup in a single view.
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I've found that a structure like the one above is probably the most practical and the one I always return to, but I've never succeeded in liking it - largely due to the need to represent task requirements in context hierarchies with duplicate elements for example combinations of:
Place/Category/Resource
Category/Place/Resource
Category/Resource
Resource/Category
etc. etc.
For example, suppose I have an issue with my work PC that I need help with from John. Where should I put the task?:
Office/People/John/task
Office/PC/task
People/Office/John/task
People/John/task
PC/Office/task
OfficePC/task
They're all appropriate and perhaps it's just a matter of taste or personal needs.
However, I will almost certainly want to be able to view:
- Everything I can do at the Office
- Everything I can do at my PC
- All the People I need to see today at the Office
- Everything I need to discuss with John
As long as I can do that, the task won't get lost. But whichever context structure I chose, some of these things will be easy and some will require the desktop version of OF to create custom perspectives that require constant maintenance as the structure evolves.
In reality, "Office", "PC" and "John" are all available to me in various permutations that I won't have modelled with my structured contexts.
General purpose tagging could conceptually solve this problem, no doubt cause others and has been discussed at enormous length elsewhere.
But for now I seem doomed to repeat a cycle:
1. simplify my contexts and perspectives
2. become overwhelmed by task numbers
3. add more context structure and perspectives to reduce clutter
4. become overwhelmed by the complexity of my contexts/perspectives
5. goto 1
Is it just me?