View Single Post
Most of software development my tasks are computer, but I still divide them into subcontexts like:

- Design
- Coding
- Testing
- Documentation
- Mindless
- Network

(To explain the less obvious ones:

"Network" is for anything that involves babysitting a bunch of slow network copies; it's handy to check the Network list when I'm doing something else and I might as well have something copying in background.

"Mindless" may really be any of the other contexts, but the defining characteristic is that it's mindless work that I can do when my brain isn't interested in starting up. This is one of the places where I'd like to have a tags capability.)

If I wanted to further subdivide "Coding", I would probably divide it into the nature of the coding, like:

- Debugging
- Drafting (Writing whole new features with big sweeps.)
- Finalizing (Cleaning up the missing bits of what I created during Drafting)
- Modification (Making minor fiddling changes to what already exists in production.)
- Moving (Moving hunks of code, generally from the "drafting" sandbox to the official codebase.)
- Visual (Designing reports and screens and pages - I have lousy visual skills, so I have to be at my best to do this.)

All of these treat my mental state as the primary resource/context, because that is the primary limiting factor. So that's how I'm getting past the "resources" versus "work mode" issue.

Sometimes I can breeze through writing big chunks of functionality in Drafting mode and I have no patience for Finalizing or Modification. Sometimes I have patience but no view of the big picture, so I can go through my Modification tasks and knock off bitty things one by one. (Change that label, widen that report column, add a filter to that report.) And so on.

In fact... Hm. I haven't used that second set of contexts, and I haven't included all possible coding tasks in my available GTD tasks, because there are too many of them and I get lost in the flood - I stuff a lot of the less urgent ones into Someday/Maybe. Maybe adding these contexts could solve that problem. I might give it a try.

Gardener