I’ve been using Omnifocus for a long time now, and it’s helped a lot, but lately I’m really struggling to get anything done. So I started watching some of the videos on the site, and I see discussion about having energy levels as a context. This really resonates with me because what I feel up to doing revolves heavily around my energy level. So I get buried in a mountain of stuff with context “Home” or whatever, and I procrastinate and don’t start anything, because my head is not in the right place to even look at the high energy tasks.
The trouble is, energy level is very orthogonal to all my existing contexts. There are some things I can only do at work, high energy. Some things high energy I can do work or home. Some things I can only do at home with high energy. So I find myself wanting either multiple contexts, or a new field to describe energy level, or customised fields or something. I could make sub-contexts under work or home, but it doesn’t allow for things I can do anywhere. If I do that I can’t just find all high energy stuff that I can do in either place.
Another quirk of mine is I really hate to make non-personal phone calls. So once I start making non-personal phone calls, I just want to do them all and get them done. So for me, it’s also a high energy task. If I have non-personal phone calls as high-energy context, they’ll get lost in a sea of general high energy tasks. If I list them separately under phone calls. I’ll forget about them when choosing high energy tasks. It’s orthogonal. I could make phone calls a sub context of high energy, but not all phone calls are high energy, only non-personal ones.
Similarly, there are things I need to read on my iPad, some high energy, some low. Some things I need to bring up with certain people. Some high energy, some low. I end up wanting to have high and low energy contexts within everything else.
These videos discussing energy levels in relation to tasks really seem to be onto something, but I can’t see how Omnifocus supports it properly.
