A new way to work on contexts
GTD contexts can still be useful, just not exactly like in the past.
I hate to break it to you, but the original use of contexts is basically outdated.
The world has changed. The original method in the GTD book, published in 2001, had a very different context (pun intended) than what we have now. Email was tied to your desktop, work was only done from an office, and getting groceries required going outside. Laptops were rare and bulky, and smartphones didn’t exist yet.
Fast forward to today, many of us work from home (myself included), become entrepreneurs, and check email from phones while waiting for our groceries to be delivered. Our tools and environments have blurred together, making the rigid contexts of “@Computer” or “@Office” feel… Well, irrelevant and useless.
From my experience with the original contexts, it felt like rubbing salt into a wound to make it heal faster. Except that there was no healing – just friction. I didn’t feel more organized, I just felt lost. It didn’t make sense.
But it made me think: how can I adapt GTD to fit into modern life?
Revisit the concept
The main use of a context is to limit a task to a specific resource, so it becomes easier to filter a task out if it doesn’t fit your current context. When you add a context of “computer” to a task, you’re saying that the task requires a computer to be done.
But here’s the issue: your computer is almost always near you. And in many cases, the task doesn’t even need a computer – it can be done on your phone instead.
Other than location or tool-based contexts, GTD also encourages you to focus on other criteria: time available, energy level, and priority – in that order..
These contexts help you filter out what you can do right now. Yet, they can still not be specific enough. Say you got an hour before your next meeting and medium energy left, your filter could still have 12 high priority items, all due in a week. Which one do you pick?
The solution: categorize the type of tasks
While searching for a solution for this issue, I found one that was quite simple: create a context for the type of work that the task is related to.
This separation allows me to select when I feel like working on a type of task for the day, like writing. I can filter tasks for the “writing” context and select the highest priority from that list. This way, I have the freedom to select what I’ll work on without feeling lost about the tooling needed for it.
One person who heavily influenced my choice for choosing this type of context for my tasks was Carl Pullein. He uses this method coupled with time blocking, so he can lower the amount of decisions he makes at a time. You can watch his video about it on YouTube.
I personally didn’t have much luck with time blocking (blog post about it coming out in the future! Wait patiently for a rant about me being unable to use a simple productivity method and getting into a hella lot of issues because of it), so I decided to use a more GTD-focused approach: I’ll filter tasks by the time that I have available, filter for them on my task manager along with the type of task that I want to do, and choose the highest priority that matches my current energy level.
It sounds complicated, but it mostly looks like this filter in my tool of choice (Amplenote):
Conclusion
Original GTD contexts are still useful if you do a lot of manual work and still need to move to various places many times throughout the month, so you can (and should!) continue using them if they provide value to your work. However, most knowledge workers won’t be as benefited from them in the current times.
I want to know about you, though: do you use contexts like mentioned in the original GTD book? If not, how do you choose what you’ll work on at any point in time?
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