[gshenaut]

I agree mostly, but lately I've been moderately successful with time-based contexts, linked to Calendar.app. Mine are Research (my actual job), Overtime, Errand/Chores, and Noon. I set up Calendar so that the week is set up with blocks of time according to those contexts. For example, Overtime is mostly after dinner in the evening. I have morning and afternoon Research times during the week, with a hefty Noon period in between. The idea is that the Research context contains projects related to my research, papers, the lab, etc. At Noon, I try to do some exercise, practice the guitar, whatever. Overtime includes scut work and things i “should” be doing but don't really have to do. On weekends I have some Errand/Chore blocks and various at-home projects to be done at that time, plus some Overtime blocks.

When Calendar gives me an alert like “Research”, I can switch the context accordingly and see flagged actions related to my main work; when I get a “Noon” alert, I switch to it, and so on.

I think it helps some. But I agree that contexts are less useful for the kind of stuff I do than they might be for someone with more specific, assigned tasks.

The other thing about my work is that there are not many specific deadlines, nor is there often any way to estimate meaningfully how long something will take. In my world, I just sort of keep plugging away and eventually some projects get done and others morph into new projects or come to a dead end. But that doesn't mean that everything is equally important to everything else. There are definitely priorities, both among and within projects, and this is something that I believe OF could do a better job of handling.

Greg Shenaut