Spatio-Technical-Temporal Contexts?

[Gnossos]

One feature of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology is its use of "contexts." He identifies a context by prepending an ampersand ("@"). Typically they signify spatial (or geographic) contexts: @home, @work, @school, @in_car, etc. Other times they signify availability of technical resources: @phone, @computer, @scanner, etc. I see no conflict with these uses and a third category, temporal resources. For example, suppose a task needs to be scheduled only when the user has at least 3 hours to perform the task. One might then have "@3+h" as a context.

Now contexts can be signified in the Tasks plugin by treating them as tags: e.g., "#@work," but this is pretty kludgy, especially since the purpose of contexts are qualitatively different from tags. Contexts specify environments or resources needed to perform a task, whereas tags specify qualitative characteristics of a task.

Additionally, Allen's methodology is so widespread that designating contexts with a beginning ampersand is an accepted grammatical part of task management.

So, my question is: Is there a good way to use contexts, designated by a beginning ampersand, with the Tasks plugin?

[claremacrae]

Using tags

A number of people, including myself, use tags for GTD contexts. I use things like:

• #context/garden
• #context/home
• #context/town
• #context/pc_clare
• #context/pc_macbook

It works well, and is powerful with custom grouping by tags too.

Using ampersands

You are free to introduce whatever convention you want to use with @ in the description.

You could do searches like:

description includes @work

[claremacrae]

A major advantage of using tags is Obsidian's auto-suggest which is based on existing tags already in your vault.

You won't get that facility if you invent your own system with @.

(Also, various plugins like Natural Language Dates use the @ to indicate placeholder text to expand, and if you use any of those, the popup menu when you type @ could get irritating... Some allow you to change the trigger character though.)

I thought you could combine the two if you used your suggestion #@work, but it turns out that @ is not a valid character in tags.