Software that allows you to filter by multiple contexts?

So I'm about to get started on implementing GTD! Listening to the audio files and reading the books took quite a while, and now I'm just itching to get started!

I've been thinking about how I'll implement it and I decided that I will need a GTD organising software that will enable me to filter my next actions by multiple contexts.

I understand that general advice on the forum says that if you have a good context system i.e. as few as possible, then you won't need to filter by multiple contexts; but I have decided to try this out first.


Can anybody point me in the direction of any software (desktop of web-app), that will enable me to filter my next actions by multiple contexts e.g. All the next actions that I can do whilst "On my computer", "to do with blah", "and blah".

I'll be looking for myself in the meantime, but thought I'd make a request to maybe save a bit of time.

I use Outlook, without addons, and I use categories as contexts. You can then allocate any task/NA to as many categories/contexts as you like, and they filter into all the allocated contexts.

Ruth

Sorry, I should've specified that I am a Mac user.

Ready-Set-Do! is one I designed that you can try out. It allows you to process by contexts one item at a time. It's only available for the mac.

Hi Todd. Sorry, but i'm confused. Can your software let me filter my next actions by more than one context? i.e. gimme all the things I can do @Home AND @Kitchen AND @blah blah

Yes. Ready-Set-Do! uses the comments field of the Mac OS to store all of your contexts and next actions. They are in the format of

@ Home: Next action for you to do
@ Office: Next action for you to do

etc.

So when you have the Finder window in "list view" for the Mac, you can sort by the comments field and see all of your contexts in order by location (i.e. all @ Home are together, all @ Office are together, etc.). And if you want to "drill down" to just one context, you can use the search box in the Finder window to type just the context you want to focus on and then just next actions for just that context show up.

But Ready-Set-Do! also makes it possible to process your contexts one item at a time. So you can run the "Get Some Actionables Done" script and it will bring up all of your contexts. You choose, say, "@ Home", and you begin processing all of your @ Home next actions one-by-one until they're done. It'll also ensure that you are always processing the most urgent and significant ones first.

Hope that helps.

Mentat also has a great iphone interface as well as Jott support. I think it's really great for capturing tasks on the go and sorting what's next (but I am biased so try it yourself;) ). If there are any features you'd like it to have for GTD, it's still being improved too, so let us know.

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Originally Posted by YinHoNg

Hi Todd. Sorry, but i'm confused. Can your software let me filter my next actions by more than one context? i.e. gimme all the things I can do @Home AND @Kitchen AND @blah blah

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Lifebalance by llamagraphics does exactly that. You can define contexts, which they call places, and you can make some of them subsets of others. For example, you can have an @home category and have it include both @kitchen and @garage categories. To my knowledge, no other Mac program allows you to do this.

YinHoNg,

Mentat lets you set up different projects and task groups for home, various work projects, etc. The Agenda view shows you your tasks for the next day or so, but can also expand the individual task groups within the screen to see tasks relevant to home, the office, or whatever. I keep a grocery project/list that gets updated everywhere, and I focus on that one alone when I'm at the store.

Mentat doesn't support contexts explicitly yet, but it might be useful to filter out the tasks showing up in the Agenda. This seems unlikely, though as the Agenda is generally pretty short list, and you can very easily reorder it to fit your immediate situation.

It might round out the existing feature set nicely, since we aggregate work-related and personal tasks already. Being able to filter out things that you can't handle at the present seems like a useful ability, since Mentat is designed to be used all over the place and location can change the relevance of your task set.

If you are interested, check out Mentat Pro, which offers multiple projects and task lists, and sounds like it might meet your needs well. If it doesn't work out for you as it stands now, I'd like to know what you feel is missing so that we improve it.

-Daniel
http://mentat.brainmurmurs.com

The "next action" approach has really made a difference for me. I feel much less overwhelmed. I'm always looking for a better "to-do list" application and the other day I found one that really pumped enthusiasm back into my next action process. I was adding gadgets to my Google page and ran across TODOIST. It's an extremely efficient and intuitive way to write and organize next actions. TODOIST is basically free and does a better job of organizing my thoughts than applications that cost big bucks.
http://todoist.com/

John