Should Projects have a Context?

I’m confused, should projects have a context assigned to them?
If they do, then they’ll be jumbled with the Actions, and therefore hard to distinguish. But right now they show as No Context in the Context screen on iOS app.

Please advise. Thanks

Michael,

If you are using Contexts (and there is much debate about exactly how/whether to do so), then Yes!

Projects and individual Actions are meant to be identified together as part of a set of Actions which you can tackle when the conditions defined as part of a Context are met: that is the central purpose of Contexts.

As you may already know, if you put a context on a project, then all new actions added to this project are automatically assigned this context by default. This can be handy in some instances, but it’s easy to forget to change a given action from this default context to something more appropriate.

I generally don’t put a context on a project (or single action list) as, in most cases, a project includes actions with a variety of contexts. For example, I might be working on outcome that involves low and high focus tasks, conversations with people and errands.

As you noted, projects without a context will appear under “No Context” in the Contexts perspective if the View setting is set to Remaining. It would be nice to have an option to hide projects with no context from this list.

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Michael,

Please defer to Tim’s reply here: he’s much more knowledgeable than I!

If I may paraphrase both our replies… you can assign different Contexts to various items within Projects; your aim (if you use Contexts) is to group all otherwise disparate actions by the circumstances that make completing them most efficient.

For example a Project to redesign your garden may (if you do (decide to) use Contexts) may have an overall Context of ‘Home Improvement’.

Within that, some (groups of) Tasks may be in the ‘Phone to obtain quotes’ Context; some may be in a ‘Buy at store’ Context; and others may be in the ‘Get out the CAD software and design my dream landscape’ Contexts. By assigning Tasks to Contexts, you can complete them in batches and in sequence(s) that require less doubling up.

Particularly since there may be Tasks in other Projects, or single Tasks, which are also best (or even only) done when you are at the same store! That’s one of Contexts’ purposes.

(These Context names are not good ones in reality; but may indicate the way in which some people take advantage of their availability.)

You cannot apply more than one Context to any given Action (or Project) in the current version of OF 2.

Reason why I do set default Contexts on All projects.

One thought is to create a context called something like “No Context - Project” that could be used for projects where it doesn’t make sense to have a default context. Actions added to this project will have this context by default and the “No Context - Project” context would be a prompt to specify the appropriate context for the action.

If using the Pro edition, then a “Missing Context” perspective could be created to show all actions that show up under either “No Context” or “No Context - Project”.

It’s not ideal, but would do the job.

Well, to me default contexts on projects do the job.
I normally define ‘Have to’ as my default context for (most) work related projects, and ‘Want to’ as my default context for (most) personal projects. Others go with ‘Home’, some with ‘Office’ and all lists with ‘Lists’ (on hold)… that actually speeds up a lot processing the Inbox, as I only have to set projects on most tasks.

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Thanks for sharing, Edi. Interesting to read about your approach.

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