[pjc]

Originally Posted by MEP

Am I the only one who thinks that "Buying tickets" would fit into the Home context?

It could, but it seems a little bit of a stretch. Is it something you can only do at home? If so, Home is the right place for it. But if you could do it while waiting for the bus or at the office, then Phone is probably appropriate. On the other hand, if you need to coordinate with a spouse and kids, maybe Home is appropriate.

In reality, I think "buy tickets" is probably a small project. You'll need to look up the show times and prices, you'll need to look up the phone number, you'll need to pick a show time (coordinating with people as necessary), and THEN you'll actually need to purchase the tickets. In very simple cases (e.g. buying movie tickets on Fandango with your spouse in the room), this could be one online task. But if you're going to make a call, looking up the number is often a separate precursor.

This is all to say that you don't just "happen" to buy the tickets either on the phone or online. You plan for one or the other (e.g. at least by looking up the phone number or not). You should assign the task of buying the tickets to a context accordingly.

[slinberg]

Thanks for your thoughtful and informative post. I think the disconnect for me here is, as you pointed out, the notion that I myself might be in multiple contexts at any given point, and that getting used to selecting all contexts that apply when sitting down to determine what's next is a better way to approach this than putting items into multiple contexts.

I'll rearrange things and put this into play and see if it works for me. (BTW, I'm working my way through the book now, but of course I was impatient and wanted to jump right in after skimming the first half. Bad me.)

Thanks again.

[pjc]

Thanks for the kind response -- I was worried that my message might come across as more critical than it was intended. I'm happy to help!

Originally Posted by slinberg

getting used to selecting all contexts that apply when sitting down to determine what's next

OF has "Perspectives" to allow you to save which contexts & views you have selected for things you do often. So I have one that I use for home and one that I use for office, each of which select the appropriate "Contexts" for those physical locations...

[rmacnaughton]

I want to throw an example out there to help push the inclusion of a multiple contexts (or contexts as tags instead of buckets) feature.

David Allen, at one of his recent roadmap seminars, mentioned the value of having an @Braindead context that you can throw the easy slam-dunk kind-of actions into for when you're totally overwhelmed and need a few quick wins.

To use this context effectively, I'd like to see what my @Braindead actions are within @Computer/Internet, @Phone, etc... If contexts were simply tags (as they ar in GTD-Gmail) I could easily pull-up my actions related to this context.

This also allows other energy-based contexts for those actions that require a great deal of attention, the ones that take 5 minutes, and the ones that require little focus (i.e. data-entry, or @Monkey-task).

[LizPf]

Originally Posted by rmacnaughton

David Allen, at one of his recent roadmap seminars, mentioned the value of having an @Braindead context that you can throw the easy slam-dunk kind-of actions into for when you're totally overwhelmed and need a few quick wins.

Ooh, I like that!

Braindead, worker, that's me :-)

--Liz

[SpiralOcean]

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...hlight=tagging

[Liquid Engineer]

I just started using OmniFocus, as a replacement for TaskPaper. So far I'm really loving it. But the multiple context issue cropped up for me as well, almost immediately. Specifically, I've run into some roadblocks when trying to use iCal synchronization.

I'm a law student and would like to use OmniFocus to manage my homework/tasks. In iCal I have two calendars, Law School and Law School Events -- the first for my schedule/assignments, and the second for other events (e.g.: Orientations, meetings, etc.). I'd like to use the iCal Sync in OmniFocus to link tasks to those calendars, and I'm not seeing a really intuitive way to do this, as my contexts are rather generic: website, computer, email, scanner, office, snail mail, etc.

This does not provide enough grandularity to easily synch tasks to the appropriate calendars. One solution I've thought of is parent contexts for each of my classes and child duplicates of the actual contexts I want to use hierarchically beneath them (e.g.: Legal Writing : computer, Legal Writing : email, Legal Writing : library, etc.). Then I could tell OF to sync the parent contexts to where I want them. I think this would work, but it seems awfully cludgy, and duplicates a lot of information in a way that would make OF lose some of its elegance. I'd no longer be able to use context view to show me every instance of a task with an "email" context, since there's now five so-labeled contexts and I'd have to check each of them separately.

I'm a bit stumped. If contexts are what you need and/or where you should be to get something done, I suppose I'm looking for a "why am I doing this" tag/context of some sort that I could use to sync to iCal.

Syncing by context seems a bit strange itself. I can't think of any situation where I'd want to sync items in an email context to a single calendar. I email for work, home, school, and pleasure.

Am I missing something here? Is there another way I can do what I want to do that I'm just not seeing?

[brianogilvie]

Since you posted a similar message to another thread, I replied there, but I'll repeat my basic question: to what are you then syncing the tasks in iCal? To a Palm, or a smart phone?

If you're not syncing them to anything else, then why bother in the first place? Omni developed iCal syncing because it's a good intermediate step for then syncing the Mac tasks to another device. There's really no point in syncing just to get the actions in iCal. Just use OmniFocus to access your actions; if you want to focus on a folder, use the Focus command in Planning mode and then switch to Context mode to see only tasks from that folder.

Please forgive me if you've already figured this out; it's hard to tell how much a new user has already discovered, and I'd rather be too obvious than too cryptic.

[Gardener]

Originally Posted by pjc

...I'm not sure I see the situation in which multiple contexts for a task would really be appropriate....

I posted an example in the other, really really long thread. I hope that the following URL takes you straight to the post:

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...3906#post43906

I'd be happy to hear where I'm wrong on this, but I'm not seeing it yet. I do admit that it's a pretty specific category of task (essentially, specific kinds of research) so that it might not be a high priority on the feature list, but I do think that it's a legitimate use for multiple contexts.

Gardener