Quote:
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Originally Posted by michelle
What do you think about hierarchical contexts? Ex: Office>Calls>Fred
Michelle
The Omni Group
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Interesting...
Let me start with the problem I have with a flat list...
1. I want to keep my work and personal projects seperate. It's a GTD no-no. But when I'm at work, I don't want to see anything that isn't work related. I don't want to see all my home calls with my work calls, or home computer items with work computer items. I want to be at work, and see what I have to do there. Work is a context, a supercontext if you will. In my work context, I have all the same contexts as my home context, calls, computer, agendas, etc.
This creates a bunch of duplicate contexts.
home-calls
home-computer
home-errands
and
work-calls
work-computer
work-errands
If items could be tagged, then i could have...
home
work
calls
computer
errands
2. Agendas
I don't want to have an agenda list that is 20 items long with different peoples names on the items. Because when I talk to someone, I have to scan the items to see if there are any there. With tagging, I could have peoples names and tag with agendas.
3. Projects
If we could have a project tag, then when a huge project is due and I need to focus only on that project, I could filter by
project-calls
project-computer
And be assured that I can trust the system to help me meet my deadline, instead of mentally filtering out tasks... thinking, is this part of this project?
That's just a few of how the tagged contexts could be used.
Now back to heirarchy...
1. used in task list
it would be nice in the task list, to see all the tags that i could further filter down into from my current tag.
If I have items tagged
calls-george
calls-jim
and in my task list I select the calls filter
underneath I could see what other further filtering I could do.
calls
george•jim
This would allow me to drill down into a fine and focused amount of items.
Amazon.com does a great job of this when searching for items.
2. Used in outline
Instead of a heirarchy of contexts, how about the ability to tag... the tags?
I've use memo leaf and a problem is always how do you manage your tags?
When I'm at work... I only want to see tags associated with work. This relates to your heirarchy...
work-calls-apple
work-calls-omni
if the user was able to tell omnifocus, that the work tag has these tags under it:
calls
and the calls tag has these tags under it
apple omni
and a computer tag has an apple tag under it
but the overall list was still a flat list. It would also allow people to get as crazy with tags or as simple as they want.
This would help the user when tagging contexts.
I create a task item, and tag it work
I then see all the contexts under work tag it calls
I see all the contexts under calls and tag it apple
If I wanted to drill back up I could tag the same task home
errands
the task would have the tags
work-calls-apple home-errands
then, when i am driving in the car, i can click on the errands context and see the call to make. when i need to see phone calls to make, i can click on the calls context, see all the home & work calls, click on the work context and see all the work calls.
The heirarchy would be helpful for allowing users to see how their tags are related, but if it's too heirarcical, then it becomes tied to the heirarchy. The heirarchy should be there, but able to be broken at any time and rearanged.
One other thing... please allow contexts to be assigned by keyboard. Some easy keyboard interface to assign contexts. Even allowing quicksilver or launchbar to assign contexts would be helpful. Not tying down contexts to specific kestrokes, but allowing to be search upon like QS or LB allows and then assigned.
And it would be nice to allow my task list context to be assigned by the keyboard as well.
command+spacebar brings up the task list
c brings up calls
enter
and I'm looking at calls.
I'll put this in another post... ;-)