[whpalmer4]

Well, you wanted start today. The perspective gives you that — just scroll to today's date. You can collapse all of the others if you don't want to see them, using the triangle at the top right of each group. They will be sorted by context even though the context isn't displayed. If you are unsure of which context an action is assigned, you tap on it and look. It's not a perfect solution, just the best one available in most cases :-)

You get two axes, if you will, on which to hang your data. If you want to hide some of it, you have to group by the characteristic which will let you separate out the data you don't want. That leaves sorting for the other characteristic. You can group by context, but then you'll get all start dates in your display with no way of hiding the other dates — you probably have more data with different start dates than you have contexts. Adding to the challenge is a design decision to put actions with no start date at the top of the list, though if you put start dates on everything, and start (and complete) actions when they first start, this may not be a problem, in which case group by context and sort by start date will work okay, especially if you are displaying available actions (which will hide anything that has yet to start).