I'm trying to implement the whole
Getting Things Done approach by David
Allen. One of the big recommendations is to sort your work into "contexts." For
example, sort your next actions into contexts like "on the phone", "at the
computer", "running errands", etc. That way when you're able to use your phone
for 10 minutes, you have a ready-made list of next actions that you can do and
make productive use of that 10 minutes instead of playing Bubble Breaker on your
PDA.
Merlin over at 43folders has a post
about people's suggested contexts, and what he calls
meta-contexts:
I’m using this to make three “meta-contexts” that mirror the very general
types of work into which all my tasks (and their parent contexts) belong.
- Real World - Primarily physical or location-based
stuff (esentially: “non-computer” contexts)
- Think - Brain work, decision-making, and creative
stuff — which usually occurs in the proximity of a Mac, but absolutely
does not have to.
- Compute - Tasks that by their nature require direct
computer interaction: this is the “@computer” uber-category
Merlin uses an Apple, so his example shows how to use iCal to have multiple
calendars, each assigned to a meta-context and a sub-level context. His
meta-context and context breakdown is this:
- Real World
- errands
- chores
- calls
- read
- Think
- brainstorm
- decide
- research
- schedule
- write
- Compute
- desk
- design & code
- email
- google
- mac anyplace
- print
- web
- monitoring
So I started looking to see if Outlook 2003 could do the same thing. Luckily
after a very brief search, I found an
Outlook 2003 Views Add-in (links to the article, the download is in the
upper right) that did pretty much the same thing, except
Outlook calls them categories and labels instead of separate calendars. Assign
items on your schedule to one or more categories and/or labels. Then create a
custom view to display only the items you want. There are built-in categories
and labels, and you can add your own with user-defined colors. Sweet!
