Quote:
Originally Posted by usertech
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.
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I can create a perspective showing only the multiple contexts I can do at work (work, Mac, Phone, Online, Work Agenda.
Creating perspectives allows you to create perspectives showing multiple contexts or multiple projects without needing to switch between contexts. You can also add a keystroke to automatically invoke it or put a perspective icon on the toolbar for quick and easy access. I can scan all available tasks in this perspective with just one click or keystroke. I don't need to click between all the different contexts. There's no friction here.
I'm going to guess and think that manual sorting in context will imply a sense of importance to tasks placed higher on the list?
But sometimes I'll ignore the topmost task and just do the third task. Maybe the third task just shot up in importance because my boss called me and told me that the task deadline has been moved up 3 hours and I need this done now before the rescheduled meeting. This just basically destroyed any manual context sorting with one phone call from the boss (or anyone).
Manual sorting sounds like more "busy bee" work for me. I look like I'm busy because I'm fiddling and tweaking my projects and contexts but I'm not really getting anything done. That creates more friction for me. Life is too dynamic and it can and will destroy manual sorting in a heartbeat.
But I guess manual sorting must be the "in thing" and some users are asking for it. Yet no one has made a program with manual contextual sort.