Someday/maybe:

• At an indefinite time in the future.
• A possibility or uncertainty.

Someday/maybe covers a list of tasks that you intend to reassess in the future, but have no immediate intentions to act on them because they are currently outside the scope of your day-to-day life. They include interests like learning a new language, buying a particular book, building a new extension on your home or even taking a hiking trip across Europe… basically all those ideas and plans that you don’t have the time, information, inclination or capability to pursue today. For instance, the hiking trip would first rely on you building up some savings. You can’t fly over to Europe immediately but someday, maybe you’ll be able to do it.

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Effective:

• Producing or capable of producing an intended result.
• Doing something adequately to accomplish a purpose.

Effectiveness is all about doing the right things. While what projects and tasks one can class as appropriate to do will vary between situations and individuals, the general rule of thumb is to determine how much value the task will provide to you (or the company) by doing it. If attending a conference full of open minded people will lead to lots of new clients, that is an high value task making good use of your time and energy. However, if you were to start randomly ringing people up from your phonebook in the hopes of raising business that would be a poor choice of task, likely to result in minimal rewards for the amount of time it sucks up.

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Efficiency:

• Producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or effort.
• Ability to accomplish a job with a minimum expenditure of time.

Efficiency and productivity (in its traditional sense) have a key similarity. They both involve doing work in the most economical way possible and as a result there are numerous tips, practices and suggestions you can follow to achieve that. Efficiency can be measured in any number of ways, from how well you use your time to how little energy and stress you exert in doing your work. Nobody wants their work to become a chore but by being efficient this can be minimized.

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Action:

• Organized activity to accomplish an objective.
• The most important work or activity in a specific field or area.

Next actions are the next physical steps you need to take to move a project. When you look at a project it can often be difficult to determine where to start. That’s why you take time to define what the next action would be. Most projects can be vague and abstract, such as “tidy the house.” But where do you start? What do you do next? Without deciding on a next action, it can often be difficult to see how to move a project forward, or to even start it. Taking the house tidying project as an example again, it would typically be broken down into individual room mini-projects. Maybe on a to-do list you would simply put down to clean the bedroom. However, where to start with that? The next physical action could be to clear the floor of all rubbish and clothes. Next, it could be to dust and finally you would hoover up.

Next actions are not always immediately obvious. Putting down a next action of “ring John” might seem simple enough, until you realize you don’t have his number. You can’t action this task, it’s not the next physical step. The next action ends up being to search for his number instead. Though the GTD approach of defining your next actions can mean more thought and time with planning, when it comes to actually working on your projects your path to completing them is much more clear.

For detailed information on defining your next actions read my guide.

Context

• The circumstances in which an event occurs; a setting.
• That which surrounds, and gives meaning to, something else.

GTD encourages the use of contexts to break down long and expansive to-do lists. Without them where would you start? What would you choose to do at any particular time? By breaking down your lists according to different settings and situations, it becomes a simple matter of selecting a list appropriate to your current context. For instance, if you are near a phone, you only need look at those next actions that require you to make a phonecall.

This also means that it stops you from being distracted by next actions that are not relevant to your current circumstances, for instance, you don’t have to look at home contexts when you are at work.

Contexts can be as simple or as complicated as required. The basic @computer (GTD contexts are typically represented with a @ symbol) can be further split down to @internet and @email contexts if necessary.