Get ‘er done
Getting things done, the methodology of organizing your to-do’s, is an interesting system. It’s advocated by many different people and used by even more people. A lot of different developers and managers advocate the system because it deals with the question of “stuff”.
Without getting into the tinier details of it, the system advocates organizing your to-do list by project and context. The general idea is that you organize your to-do’s with regards to where you are or what you might be doing. For example, if you need to make a phone call to Natalie your to-do might look like “@phone Call Natalie (604-555-9923).” So when you’re in a place where you can make a phone call you bring up your @phone list and viola!
Of course, the assumption is that you take your lists with you (either by lo-fi organizer or PDA) so when the context comes up, you’ll have your list available and ready. The ultimate goal being like the ready state in martial arts, always ready to pounce and react.
I find the system itself fascinating but the it is obviously dependent on how you organize your contexts. So here is a question that I pose to the GTD’ers out there: How do you organize your contexts or maybe give some example of the different contexts that you use?
1:21 pm
Comments on this post
My contexts are organized in the usual manner as recommended by David Allen, phone, work, home, errand, etc., though I also use people to great advantage as a context. That way, whenever I am meeting with someone, I just pull up the context by their name and I have everything I’ve associated with them. I’ve written a couple of posts on my blog recently that provide some details on the system I use. You can read more at http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com
I know the trouble for me is figuring out how granular to make my contexts. For example, I could make an @shopping context, but I could be as crazy as to use one for each specific store. @bestbuy @futureshop.
John, I like the idea of organizing the context by name, I think that definitely makes sense.