I had the brilliant idea last night to create a new user account in order to manage two separate lists of actions. My goal was to create a ‘personal’ account and a ‘work’ account. That way while I’m at work I can focus on work related ideas. The problem is that you cannot keep two active sessions in Tracks. My hope was to keep both Work and Personal tabs open in Firefox at the same time.

The are a few other ways to attack this idea. One, for example, would be to create contexts such as @Phone-Work and @Phone-Personal.

I mentioned it in another post, but tags (for actions and projects) would be an effective way of addressing this. With tags, I could theoretically filter/sort my next actions between work and personal.

Does anyone else separate work and personal actions? If so, how are you managing it?

Thanks for the input.

jpep - 29 August 2006 02:09 PM

Does anyone else separate work and personal actions? If so, how are you managing it?

Hi jpep. One of the things that attracted me to GTD was the concept that one system was there to support you in your whole life, not just work, or just home. (I do have an “office” context, which isolates actions that I can complete at the office.) Anyone else have thoughts about this?

Doesn’t the whole idea of contexts address this “while I’m at work I can focus on work related ideas”? I can see perhaps how tags might make your actions more organized in a weekly review, but as far as the actual getting things done goes, if your circumstances demand a separation between work and personal actions, your contexts should be set up as one or the other; then only assign work actions to work contexts and personal actions to personal contexts.

Good point. I don’t have Work as a context though. I have Phone, Email, Computer, etc. That way while I’m at work, I can look and see all the emails I have to send or all the phone calls I have to make. If I just had a Work context, then I would still have to manually filter out my phone calls and emails. If I group all my Phone actions together than I have to manually sort out my work-related phone calls while I’m at the office.

The last couple days I have been trying out separate logins for work and personal and it seems to be working well. It helps me focus on work related items while I’m actually at work. A few times during the day I logout of my work account and login to my personal account for a quick action check.

Have I confused everyone yet?

I wasn’t clear - I didn’t mean that contexts should only be 1)@Work and 2)@Personal. Rather, I meant that as long as none of your contexts (@Office, @Computer, etc.) “straddle” the work/personal divide (if that divide is important to you), the problem should take care of itself. In the case you raise, it seems to me that if you only want to make work calls at work, there’s no question that you should have an @Phone-Work context.

If your separate-login solution is a way to get a cleaner interface, perhaps it will be made unnecessary by coming changes to Tracks. I’ve heard talk of a “dashboard”—I hope that would allow customizeable sets of contexts to show on a main page. That would be a more elegant solution to your issue, I would think.

I’m with lukemelia and Craig: I think if you can possibly keep actions for all the things in your life together, it’s a big help. For one thing, it means that you don’t overcommit yourself in any one area, because you have a clear idea about everything you have to do. But I agree that the problem is not getting distracted by the clutter if there are things you can’t do right now because your boss would fire you

I’m about to create another login for work too.

Bsag, one reason user’s might want to do this is appearances. If my boss walks by my screen and sees a bunch of work related to-do lists she’ll be really happy, however if she also sees things like ‘take guitar lessons’ ‘call doctor’ ‘plan vacation’ etc she’s going to wonder what I’m spending time on. Or maybe she won’t but I’ll worry about it!!

I agree that ideally everything would be in ONE system. If the dashboard mentioned is implemented this would of course solve it…if I could only show projects in a certain context (contexts - work phone, work email, work online, etc.) or tags…which would solve the context naming problem…just add ‘work’ to the tag of project (tasks inherit project tags) or on the task level then filter view by ‘work’ tag.

Another reason is simply clutter as I have dozens of work projects and hundreds of work tasks and don’t want them all listed along with my short and long term projects and tasks. I mean, it is a huge list to wade through!!!

@jpep - have you tried using different browsers. It’s not ideal, but if you actually wanted to be logged into work AND home maybe login to home on Firefox and login to IE (beta 7 has tabbed browsing too) or Flock (Firefox clone made for blogging) or other. Not sure if this works. Worth trying!

I’m hoping that if future versions of Tracks support filtering context or tags to make the multiple login workaround uneccesary, it will be easy to reassign all tasks to one user using a couple of sql statements!