Contexts and Channels

Purpose

Channels allow you to categorize tasks, events, and objectives so that you can better understand where you are spending your time each day. The daily shutdown, daily planning, and weekly review flow will show you a breakdown of how you spent your time by channel.

Contexts allow you to group several channels together so that you can quickly focus your on one context at a time. For example, you can switch to your "#work" context to see all just your work tasks, or you can switch to your "#personal" channel to see all your personal tasks for the day.

Walkthrough

How to use

Accessing your channel menu · 1:45

You can click "Channels" or "Manage Channels" in the left hand panel to enter the Channel Menu. From here you can create/edit contexts and channels.

Assigning to a channel · 2:58

Tasks, Calendar Events, and Objectives have a dropdown that allow you to set the channel. You can use the keyboard shortcut # or Q to show the channel selector.

Navigating to a context/channel · 1:00

You can navigate to a single context or channel by clicking on that context/channel from the left hand panel. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Cmd L to change the currently selected channel. This is especially helpful if you are in a view where the channel selector is not available.

When you select a channel, you'll see just the tasks and objectives in that channel. Your calendar events always show in the calendar view, regardless of the channel you have selected.

If you've selected a top-level context, you'll see all the items in that context and in it's nested channels.

The #all channel · 0:51

The #all channel shows you all your items across all your channels and and those that don't have a channel.

If you feel like your tasks have disappeared, make sure to go back to the #all channel.

Hiding channels · 2:37

If there's a channel you no longer want to use, you can hide it from the left hand panel by clicking the "Visible" toggle from the channels menu.

Best Practices

• Create at least two contexts, one for work and one for personal. During your workday, you'll mostly work with your #work context selected. This keeps you from getting distracted from things that might not be relevant till later in the day.
• Contexts and channels are also useful for timeboxing tasks to different calendars. Read more about how how you can link channels and calendars.
• If you have multiple jobs or part of multiple organizations, that's usually a good reason to create an additional context.
• Don't create too many channels per context. 5-7 channels is usually a good amount. It's easy to get obsessed with finding the perfect taxonomy and organization of your data but it won't actually help you work with calm and focus.
• Channels help you understand where you are spending your time and that's why their best kept fairly high-level e.g. just use #hiring instead of #phone-screens #interviews #debriefs.