digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Keep separate GTD context lists, even when working from home, so you can focus on the right next actions and switch between work and home tasks deliberately. Contexts have become more subtle than location alone, and they can reflect your energy level, available tools, and the kind of activity you're doing.
Key Points
- Work and home contexts remain useful distinct lists, preventing inappropriate attention to one at the expense of the other.
- Contexts can reflect energy and focus demands, such as a writing context best suited to morning deep work, or a deep-thinking context for demanding tasks like writing code.
- Context can reflect your available toolset: whether you are signed into the VPN or Salesforce, or whether you are on a break.
- Changes of setting, such as stepping outside for fresh air or making calls during a break, can themselves help create focus.
- A "post-pandemic," "after the lockdown," or "return to office" context holds items you are renegotiating or must postpone, so you can focus on what you can currently control.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: Create separate context lists for work and home so they don't blur together.
- Concrete instructions: Assign contexts based on energy and focus. For example, create a writing context and do it in the morning when your best writing happens, and a deep-thinking context for demanding work.
- Concrete instructions: Define contexts by available toolset, such as "VPN connected," "Salesforce," or "on a break," so you know which actions you can actually do right now.
- Concrete instructions: Create a call context you handle during a planned break, stepping outside to make calls.
- Concrete instructions: Create a "post-pandemic" (or "return to office") context to park items you're renegotiating or can't act on yet, with a commitment to revisit them later.
- The speaker's example of a writing context and a deep-thinking context is personal, not a prescribed framework, and the speaker notes that not every context needs to be a physical location.
- The speaker suggests that the current period offers a chance to learn how you work without external distinctions shaping your routine.
Bottom Line
Use contexts to match tasks to your current energy, tools, and circumstances, which makes it easier to focus and switch deliberately even when work and home share the same space.
