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What Contexts do you use? Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I am sure that this has been asked before. I did a search and could not find one because there are so many posts with the word contexts.

I would love it if people were to posts their lists of contexts here and give a little idea around them.

Cheers
Joe
 
I think there are a few other threads, but I'm not seeing them at the moment. Here's my contexts:

Broadway
Home
Computer
>Laptop
>BugSnacker
Out the Door
Phone
People
>Daniel
>Brian
>Aaron
Waiting
Omni
East Side
Home Depot
Groceries
Downtown

Broadway is a street with several businesses where I do most of my irregular errands. The bank and post office and liquor store are on Broadway. So if I'm going to any one of those places, I might as well go to the rest if I have any reason to. I set the location while I was up there recently.

Home is for anything to be done at home. Laundry, tidying up, doing a photo inventory of all my stuff for insurance purchases, playing Zelda.

Computer is for anything that can be done at either my work computer or my laptop. This is mostly work stuff, but not exclusively.

Laptop is for stuff that actually has to be on my laptop, such as buying an app for my iPhone, or posting photos to my Flickr account.

BugSnacker is for bugs I need to file in Omni's bug-tracking database. I can do these from work easily. But on my laptop I have to connect to work to do it, so it's kind of a pain. And it's faster to do a bunch at once, so I've found it worth separating from all my other computer tasks.

Out the Door is the context I'm supposed to check every time I leave for work in the morning or leave work in the evening. "Take spare iPhone cable to work", "Drop off car for oil change on the way to work", etc.

Phone is completely empty and maybe shouldn't exist. My phone is always with me. On the other hand, I think a "Business Hours" context might be useful for when I need to call my doctor or something.

People is for conversations I need to have. Some could be by email. Some need to be in person. The email ones usually never make it in here, since they're generally less than 2 minute tasks.

Waiting is for stuff I've ordered that's coming in the mail, or anything else thata I'm, um, waiting for. This context is in the "On Hold" state.
 
Omni is for anything I physically need to be at work to do. In-person conversations with co-workers generally go here. Or printing something.

East Side is for errands like Costco or Petco that are most convenient when I'm over in the Redmond/Bellevue area.

The Home Depot I usually go to is not really near any of my other contexts, so it just needs its own context.

Groceries is for anything I can buy at a grocery store. Usually this means placing an order with Amazon Fresh. But I also want to be able to pull out this list if I'm at a "real" grocery store, so I keep it separate from my computer contexts. (If I need something that Amazon Fresh doesn't have, I'll put it in my Broadway context, since there's a grocery store there.)

Downtown is another cluster of occasional shopping destinations -- Nordstrom's, Old Navy, Pike Place Market, etc.


Anyone else want to chime in, or point us to previous examples of contexts?
 
Here's my current list, substantially trimmed down from the last time I posted about it:
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  • I use hierarchical contexts for Home, because I do a lot of home improvement projects. So Home --> Chores is for grungy jobs. Home --> Office is for things like paying bills or writing the family Christmas letter. Home --> With Lisa is for things I need to remember to mention to my wife. I'll use the parent Home context for actions like "Take out the trash", that don't require any specific context besides being at home.
  • Phone is self-explanatory, though I'm thinking about splitting it into Phone-Business and Phone-Personal to make it easier to ignore phone calls that I need to make during or outside of business hours.
  • Briefcase is for pen and paper or reading activities that I can do wherever I have my laptop bag. (Coffee shop, airport, office, etc.)
  • I use hierarchical contexts for my Mac so that it's easy to show just the tasks that I can do when without network access (Mac --> Offline). I'm also trying to carve out one day a week for just writing; hence the Writing sub-context.

I think the others are fairly standard. I use a variety of custom perspectives to group my contexts into common subsets. Here's my current list of perspectives:
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Sorry if that's a bit hard to read. The forum software seems to down-sample png files to smaller jpg files.
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Cheers,

Curt
 
 


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