text/gemini; lang=en
# Contexts and sequencing
When GTD was first published one of the new ideas was to sort your “next actions” list into contexts like “Calls”, “Do at home”, “Errands”, “Do at desk” and so on.
This was great for two reasons. One: it’s more efficient to do something in one trip than in two, and that reduces overhead. Two: that’s also psychologically a motivator! It’s satisfying to “I might as well do this as long as I’m doing that”, that just feels good and unclumsy and elegant. And while it sometimes feels like it’s not worth making the schlep to do one thing, it might start to feel really worth it once you have a couple of things to do there to tip you over the top. (Although that's a double-edged sword once a context gets full of so many daunted and dreaded things that you don't even want to go there in the first place because then you'd have to do the totally dreaded thing.)
For many people, “contexts” have fallen of the wayside in modern GTD since they have the world in their pockets at all times so what’s the use? It doesn’t really add any efficiency for them, just more fiddliness with the system. And some of the contexts, like “Calls”, have become pretty dumb since I can’t really make multiple calls at once in this era of “please hold” and “we’ll call you back so keep your phone ready”.
But that’s throwing out the motivation baby with the convenience bathwater. The whole “I’m doing this while I’m here so I might as well do that” factor really did help me a lot.
Another benefit of contexts is ... Okay, one of the problems my sprawlbrain has with navigating the world is what game nerds call “Sequencing” (from card games where it subtly but crucially matters in what order your draw your cards or cast your spells); a non-game example is if you’re gonna clean the floor and dust off the tables, it’s better to do the tables first in case you spill some table dust on the floor. Having just a context-specific subset of actions to consider makes it easier to do them in a good order.
Another ginormous benefit of sorting my actions list by contexts is how that subtly nudges me to consider what the actual practical next step is. That’s something normal people maybe can’t relate to but us sprawbrained weirdos definitively can: the core issue of what psych eggheads call “executive function” is separating “end goals” from “next steps”.
Before GTD: “’Clean apartment’, yeah that would be nice, I’ll get to that any day now.”
After GTD: “Okay, so having a clean apartment is my end goal so I’ll put that on the projects list; the first step can be scrubbing my sink so I’ll get the baking soda out.”
This is something that the people-who-don’t-need-GTD can do automatically. They can get by with just a todo list because their brain automatically and instantly recognizes what’s the next step for their goals. Especially for chores they’ve done many times. (They might be out of luck if something unusual comes up that they don't know how to deal with, where GTD has a more general problem-solving approach that can handle even unusual things.) “Automatisation”, this is called in the psych world.
Now, it’s easy to get carried away with too much “I’m gonna do this so I might as well do that” and take on too much work. That’s one of the pitfalls of GTD, you get too efficient so you do too much and then you die. The solution is to keep guard of what you put on your list in the first place.
=> /gtd-bad-paths GTD bad paths
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