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What are the note taking/task managing features you dont like or think they are useless?
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Posted by Paul Korm
Apr 8, 2019 at 07:53 PM
The concept of “contexts” always befuddles me. It feels artificial. “Oh, look, I’m in the garden. Let me look at my list to see what I can do now.” I know the GTD theory is “out of mind until you’re in place where the task can be done”. But, really?
Tagging is a bit less artificial, and I do a lot of tagging in Dynalist—because it facilitates finding things in lists, not because it facilitates doing things.
Luhmann wrote:
>2. Contexts
>GTD apps like the idea of contexts, but my work doesn’t have a
>clear context. I could be at home, in my office, or at a café and
>be doing pretty much the same thing. Location alerts are sometimes
>useful however. For instance, to remind myself to pick something up when
>I’m in the office.
Posted by SmallDog
Apr 8, 2019 at 09:42 PM
I have something I call ‘context’ that I find very useful but I gather it’s not the same thing discussed here
It’s basically ‘geotags’ for your notes, which in my own cases are almost exclusively trains of thought
Often I remember a past train of thought, and the one thing I know with utter certainty is the “context” in which I had that train of thought ─── some cafe, while walking through some park, etc.
I use TheBrain so I just create a ‘jump though’ linking a note to ‘XXX cafe’ or ‘YYY park’. Then later you can get to those via these geotags.
I often do my work inside a office building, and I like to go to different floors to work. This means I have tons of extremely fine-grained geotags: 3rd floor, 4th, 5th ... each floor is further divided into this or that room, even this or that seat ...
Paul Korm wrote:
The concept of “contexts” always befuddles me. It feels artificial.
>“Oh, look, I’m in the garden. Let me look at my list to see what I can
>do now.” I know the GTD theory is “out of mind until you’re in place
>where the task can be done”. But, really?
>
>Tagging is a bit less artificial, and I do a lot of tagging in Dynalist
>—because it facilitates finding things in lists, not because it
>facilitates doing things.
>
>Luhmann wrote:
>>2. Contexts
>>GTD apps like the idea of contexts, but my work doesn’t have a
>>clear context. I could be at home, in my office, or at a café and
>>be doing pretty much the same thing. Location alerts are sometimes
>>useful however. For instance, to remind myself to pick something up
>when
>>I’m in the office.
Posted by Paul Korm
Apr 8, 2019 at 09:45 PM
@smalldog, your example is the useful case for “context”.
I was referring to “context” in the Getting Things Done sense for task tracking—a sense that I have probably bastardized, something I suspect happens a lot.
Posted by Jeffery Smith
Apr 8, 2019 at 11:35 PM
Little icons, like a musical note, or a vegetable, or a question mark.
Posted by Amontillado
Apr 9, 2019 at 11:17 AM
I didn’t make use of tags for a long time, but now I’d hate to do without them. If GTD’s idea of concepts is similar to Omnifocus’s old notion of concepts, I agree. OF’s old contexts were stilted because a task could only belong to one context. I never used them.
Now, I could live without folders easier than without hierarchical tagging, because one way to think of tags is as an alternate folder structure. That was the concept that got me started with tagging things in Devonthink and Omnifocus.
I use tags for contexts, status, and relationships. My group (folder) hierarchy in Devonthink is sort of the table of contents to my data, the tags are the index.
Paul Korm wrote:
The concept of “contexts” always befuddles me. It feels artificial.