[usertech]

blewis I will have to change my login from usertech to ErrandsMaster!

Has anyone watched the movie I made which provides ideas about how the sorting in Omnifocus could work, both manual and automatic, in both context and planning mode? If you have any comments or suggestions please reply in the other thread (which perhaps, uninspiringly, is entitled "How to (Elegantly?) Implement Manual Sorting of Context Actions". In fact the movie I created is not limited to contexts or just manual sorting - it suggests an interface that would facilitate rich sorting in Omnifocus).

blewis. Interesting point about the use of location in the iPhone version. The iPhone version allows you to locate each context on a map and when you press on Map in the main menu you will see the locations of any contexts whose locations are within range of your current location. In a sentence it's "What jobs can I get done now since I am within range of where some of them need to be done?" Of course that feature is about seeing CONTEXTS not actions on a Map and won't help someone to decide on the order they ought to buy items from various stores (unless each store is given its own context which would elevate each to a status which would probably mean that you went to them all the time. And if that was the case you would no longer face the issue of deciding on an order to go to them that is the premise of my example). It may seem like a cool feature but how many people's contexts are not linked to places which they would already be aware provide them the chance to complete actions? And if you don't realise that you have actions to do in a context, will you remember to look at the Map feature to be reminded? Probably not. I suspect it's a feature which no-one is using…. although it probably sold a few copies of the app.

I want to put on the record another reason why we need sorting of contexts. Another reason we need it is that in many situations, as whpalmer4 mentioned earlier in this thread, you are already looking at several contexts to decide which action should come next. When sitting in front of your computer at work (for those who have the chance to work with Macs, if not at home), you may be in a position to complete actions from several contexts - perhaps an email context, phone context, meeting context, or a context of items to cover with your partner or boss or family member. Considering that the projects that these actions come from may not be sequential, and even if they are you can still have more than a couple of items in a context like a Phone context, you already have a real choice in deciding which action from all of these contexts to perform next. Why add the burden, to make the decision, of requiring the scanning of all items in all contexts, just because each context cannot be sorted? As I will argue in more detail further down in this email, there are so many separate responsibilities that are unavoidably yours in Omnifocus that I can see little reason why Omnifocus shoudn't make some of them easier.