[nggalai]

Hi there!

I’ve been using some sort of quasi-GTD for some time now, long before I heard about the book and whatnot. Mostly, my approach has always been to a) get stuff out of my head and b) put tasks into what the book calls contexts. So, when I finally heard of “proper” GTD, I was an easy convert.

Anyway.

I was quite happy for the past couple of years to work with the following contexts:

@Switzerland
@Germany
@Office
@Mac
@Agenda
@Waiting-for

You see, I used to live 50:50 in Germany and Switzerland. But since January, I’ve lived mostly in Germany and work from home – no office any more. In case it’s important, I’m a writer and content editor.

Basically, most of my tasks ended up in @Mac as, well, I write on my Mac and access the various CMS from my Mac at home. In other words, the contexts didn’t “work” for me any more. So I came up with contexts more reflecting my different mindsets when going to work, rather than physicalities:

@Official (for billing, taxes and whatnot)
@Writing
@Revision
@Work (CMS stuff and the like)
@Mac (backups, updates, beta testing, colour profiles, the works)
@Agenda
@Errands
@Waiting for

and I also kept:

@Germany
@Switzerland

for those tasks that I really only can work on when in one of those countries.

As you see – quite a lot of contexts. And I’m not too happy about it … I’d rather have a maximum of perhaps five to six contexts to work with. Not ten of them.

Is anybody in a similar situation? Do you have any hints on what contexts I could merge or get rid of altogether? Or am I overly anal about it all, and lots of contexts is a good thing? Or should I follow a totally different road and, say, use time-of-day as contexts? As I tend to do similar tasks during the same hours?

Right now, my tasks are pretty nicely distributed amongst those contexts. @Germany and @Switzerland are empty, though, and have been for quite some time. Perhaps drop those two contexts?

Your help is much appreciated. :)

Cheers,
-Sascha