Contexts for home and work computers – am I thinking about this the wrong way?

OmniFocus
#1

Hi. First time poster and OF user here.

I’m currently trying out OF (Mac) and am still not sure how to best organize my tasks. My main problem at the moment is that nested contexts work the opposite way of how I would intuitively expect them to.

I have two main groups of tasks (actions and projects): work and home. I use tags in the notes of the actions for those. Some actions can only be done with specific devices, so I created contexts for “work computer” and “home computer”. Other actions just need access to any computer, which is why I put them under “computer” and made the previous two children of that context.

Since I sometimes work on work-related stuff at home, I would like to have a list of any action I can complete at the device I am sitting in front of. But in the context “home computer” I can only see actions specifically assigned to it, not the actions belonging to its parent, and in the general “computer” context I also see the actions I can only do at the “work computer”.

How would I create this hierarchy of increasing specificity in OmniFocus?

#2

This doesn’t answer your specific question, but I used to also do this.

The way I segment them now is by having just @computer, and using Project Folders to switch between work tasks and home tasks, eg:

Home and Family
  Some projects
Work
  Project 1
  Project 2

Then I have a perspective that focuses Work and then I choose the @computer context.

This works for me because most of my work stuff is on the Internet, eg Google Apps, Dropbox etc.

3 Likes
#3

I guess that’s an option. But I have work related tasks that can only be done at the work computer. Would those be separate sub-folders of the work folder then?

And if I have projects where only a few actions can not be done at home, your method would not work, am I imagining this correctly?

Anyhow, thanks for your reply!