If your GTD contexts are not used to their fullest potential, you might want to think about exchanging them for action types which will add an extra layer of clarity to your system. Since I work 100% of the time at my computer I don’t have tasks which are not done here. I could use labels like @online and @offline, but these would not show any real meaning to me.

My solution for this problem, and I know many others have context problems, is to use action types instead. Instead of trying to put my items in context by where I am doing them, I rather say what I need to do to them. For example, you can use contexts like @post (for posting on blogs), @download, @research, @develop (an idea), and so on.

This also creates some extra space for you, by allowing you to use the space required for the actual task. Until now a typical task for me would either be very vague like “write post”, or much too long like “Write post on action types instead of contexts for Hack Your Day”. However you can replace two items in that long task with contexts and categories. You can put the task in the Hack Your Day category and the fact that this is a post in the @ post context. You can now use the title of the post as the task name, which will give you more meaning, and more context.

You can use this method for any tasks you may have. Instead of having “Buy groceries”, you can simply have the task name be “milk, potatoes and juice” with the context @buy. Instead of “Marketing meeting” you can have “New brands discussion” with the context @meeting. These are all simple examples, but they will let you create lists with more meaning at first glance, and more context under the hood.

I know that there are certain definitions for each of these, but let me tell you my views on how I use them, and how I think using them leads to productivity. Usually you can only use one of these, occasionally two, like in Wordpress, but you can usually substitute one of them by using folders, or other structure elements.

Categories

I think categories are the simplest to use, I just think of them as folders. I try to limit categories as much as I can in many cases I come up with a pre-fabricated category list. It doesn’t matter if you add to it a bit, but you should keep it as simple as possible.

The biggest problem I see is that people try to use categories to search for specific things. If you are looking for one specific article on the site for example you should not be able find it using categories. From user’s point of view it doesn’t make sense for two reasons. First of all, users can just use the search box or use tags as you will see later on. Second of all, if someone is looking for all Productivity posts, how would they be able to find them if all my categories are post specific?

Therefore categories should be used sparingly, splitting your content (or data) into well defined, easily identifiable groups that have something in common.

Tags

Tags are the ones you can use to individually “categorize” data. My post on how sleeping helps you in productivity would fall under the categories of lifestyle and productivity. I would (and have) assign it tags like “sleep” for example.

Tags should give you the answer to the question “what is this article about?”, sort of like keywords. Categories give you the answer to “What is the theme of this post?”. Tags enable you to search for content specifically, even though you don’t exactly know what you are looking for.

Tags can contain a lot of information, especially if you have the flexibility of a tag cloud like on del.icio.us. I hate having a flood of info, so at first I wasn’t happy using tags. I ended up with hundreds and never thought they’d make sense. Then along came tag clouds. The more I have of a tag the bigger the font and i can even choose to cut off unique tags. This truly helps in productivity, and organization, because it lets you tag your stuff with a lot of info, but allows you to view the most important ones if you need to.

In reality if you have a huge spike for one tag, say the word you tag second most is “shoe”, with an occurrence of 40. If your most used tag is “games” with 250 occurrences, you should consider making it a category.

Labels

Labels are a bit weird because different apps use them differently. I would say that most applications use them like tags, but this is sort of a gray area. If I would have the option to use all three at once, I would use labels just as I do in real life. I would label my posts with “important”, “general”, “specific”, and so on, to give me an idea of some other characteristics.