Continuing the discussion from Multiple Contexts per Task:
Sure I’ll explain.
Historical element:
OmniFocus is based off of the Kinkless mod for OmniOutliner and was originally intended to be used in accordance to the GTD (Getting Things Done workflow).
As the GTD workflow was initially for a physical, paper-based workflow, with contexts and projects being stacked trays in physical forms, it means that you can only have one context (can’t really duplicate your paper documents, or if you do (through photocopying, printing another copy, …) it would be hard to keep track of 1) The document 2) Updates to the document (highlighting one portion of the document would entail highlighting the other, wherever it is in the context/project).
However…
To avoid being hypocritical, as I said in another post, OmniFocus (2) is not intended to be just for people who subscribe to the GTD theory, and it should not. It should be extensible. The proof primarily stems from (as I said in the post) about how there are just two mentions of GTD on the OmniFocus page on OmniGroup’s website.
Hence two other arguments following this one as to why multiple contexts per task should not be added to OmniFocus 2.
Practical element:
How would this work in terms of UX?
Workflow element:
Adding multiple contexts would add unnecessary complexity to the system. it would mean that it would appear in multiple places, which, returning back to the paper-based analogy of GTD, would be odd. How would you keep track of a task that straddles multiple contexts?
In terms of user preference – unlike issues like data density (which does warrant user-set options), multiple context radically changes how the application works, and changes the paradigm by which the application operates.
Precedent:
What other major productivity app supports multiple contexts?
Perhaps there is a reason as to why this feature is omitted, for the right reason.
Contexts is a very different concept to tag. To give an example – Evernote has both notebooks and tags. The purpose of tags is identification, whereas notebooks is for sorting. Adding multiple contexts per tags would transfer the function of the tag from being a repository (the notebook, in this comparison) to a tag. Notes in Evernote don’t straddle across multiple notebooks for a particular reason.
