David Allen had a revolutionary idea in the realm of personal productivity: sort your tasks to do by where you’ll be and the tools you’ll have. He calls these categories contexts—and in the early days of wi-fi and primitive smartphones, they were game-changers.
The idea is simple: Match your task list to where you are. If you need an internet connection to complete a task, but you’re not going to have one, don’t have that task on your list during that time. In a sea of hundreds (or thousands!) of tasks people had on their growing to-do lists, this really saved a lot of peoples’ sanity.
But these days, our tools have caught up to our work in many cases. There isn’t much I can’t do with my smartphone these days (I’m actually writing this piece on it!). And you’re hard-pressed to find a place you’ll be for any length of time that isn’t connected to the internet.
So contexts are just not as useful as they used to be. They used to eliminate 75% of your tasks. Now they chop off maybe a few.
But even if the contexts were still as robust at filtering the tasks you could do at a given moment, you’re still making a huge assumption: that you have to be in that context.
The point of the Today Card is to think about your day and decide what’s most important. And that cannot (or at least should not be subservient to a context). If anything, you may need to decide that you won’t be in a given context after all—because being there isn’t as important as an item that you can’t do in that context.
Remember, the point is the structure of the day in a way that would best serve your goals and values. That may require that you change the contexts you were originally going to find yourself in. And if that will take a significant amount of effort, it may just be worth it, and it can be an item near the top of your card.
