Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaz2010
This is one of the undesirable aspects of using nested contexts. Question: Other than the apparent organization that it affords, do you find that using nested context offers other advantages as well?
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It hasn't really been an undesirable aspect for me, because I still haven't been able to figure out what benefit I would get from the stalled filter in context mode, even if it didn't have this behavior! What would I need with a list of contexts in which I didn't have something to do?
More than half of my contexts are nested; I like being able to collapse large chunks of the sidebar when they don't pertain to what I'm doing. I've got about 30 top-level contexts and about 50 nested ones (in a total of 6 groups) so there is a substantial compaction of the sidebar when the nested contexts are closed. If I'm working by myself, I don't need to give much consideration to my Agenda contexts, so I collapse that; if I'm working at home, my Errands contexts are similarly unimportant, so I collapse that. I couldn't do that nearly as conveniently if I didn't use nested contexts.
I don't find that having a lot of contexts makes for appreciable additional overhead. About the only place where I ever have to devote much thought to which context I should assign is with errands involving purchases of items which might be gotten in a variety of different stores. For the small cluster of stores which have their own contexts and occasionally overlap (example: Target, Costco, general grocery stores for an action to buy a carton of milk) I'll file the action in the most usual place, and if I happen to be at such a store, I'll quickly check the errands context for the others to see if there's anything that I could get to possibly eliminate a trip. I used a perspective on the MacBook to do that prior to getting an iPod touch. The perspective was a bit more convenient to use, but the iPod is a lot more convenient to carry!
If I'm in a hurry when assigning contexts, I might just toss something in the top-level context and fix it up when I do my next review. I take a look at what things are in a nested context tree at the top level to see if maybe I should have another nested context.
For me, the ability to slice and dice the workload with sometimes narrowly defined contexts makes it a lot easier to keep productivity up. So many of my actions are from repeating actions/projects or created by templates that even if I have to sit and think for a minute or two about which context to use, the extra cost per action executed is negligible.