[Grail]

Originally Posted by AMM

I thought about having a separate context for each client but if I do that, my trade off is that I lose the context concept of GTD, right?

I don't have The Book here with me right now, but I'm sure the idea of contexts was that you would do exactly this - keep stuff related to work you're doing with one client in the context of that client. Since you work on a project for a client, that project becomes a "sub context" of that client.

Other projects are more "joint initiatives" where the project is the ruling context, with the client (or specific contacts for that project) being sub-contexts.

The idea is to mould the system to keep yourself organised, not to mould yourself to fit the system! It might help you to read some of Merlin Mann's productivity porn, such as this excellent article "Simplify Your Contexts"

As an example, I'm a programmer and a gamer. I have a context @Arthur which is my gaming rig, which is also where I save all my photos & videos, and is also the computer at home that is best suited for web browsing and watching movies. I also have contexts @Django Workstation for when I'm at any of my computers that have a Django programming environment available (there's also a @Rails Workstation). When I'm sitting at my gaming rig (Arthur), I'll look at the list of contexts (there are a few that apply when I'm using Arthur) and pick the Next Action from those multiple contexts.

So too, I have a context for @Phone, but I also have contexts for each of my regular contacts (@People:Frank). When I'm about to sit down to make a bunch of phone calls, I'll refresh my memory by scanning through the friend contexts to see if there's stuff I need to talk to them about while I'm on the phone (I usually end up bumping into people in the street, not on the phone). The @Phone context is for irregular things such as ringing a vendor to find what happened to that order I placed two weeks ago that was supposed to have overnight delivery…

Another way of looking at it is that if I spend more than 1/Nth of your time in one of N contexts, I expect the contexts aren't appropriately granular. The big-time context probably needs to be broken down, with the small-time contexts being merged (into eg @Errands). I'm also trying to keep my list of top-level contexts to less than 10 (since that's how many fit onto the OmniFocus for iPhone screen).

Mould the system to suit you! Make it yours :)

Apologies for the sermon.

PS: having checked my list of contexts, I've followed my own advice and removed the "Django" and "Ruby" workstation contexts – every computer I regularly work with has all that stuff installed now. Apart from @Mac:Arthur I now just have @Mac and @Mac:Online.