Context Hours

[Dwight]

Hi, I'm working on how I will use open/closed hours for contexts. I
have difficulty with a couple of things and thought maybe some of you
would have suggestions:
- the user interface for setting the hours is kind of difficult for
me to use, requiring two-handed manipulation of my laptop's trackpad.
I see that MLO can read the result back to me in text form, would it
be useful to anyone besides me to be able to *enter* the hours in text
form? My ideal would be a control like the one that's used to control
recurrence where I would be able to say something like "weekdays
9am-5pm" or "the second saturday of every month" or "every third day"
- I feel like there should be some coordination of hours across
contexts. For example, I have a @computer context which includes a
+web context. Any time I adjust the hours for @computer I have to
separately adjust the hours for +web. Do you have this issue and what
do you do about it? My ideal would be that I define +web as inheriting
the schedule of @computer. As an alternative it would be nice if I
could -copy- the revised schedule of @computer and -paste- it to +web.
This would be easier if MLO accepted text entries for context
schedule.
- like a few others that have posted to the list, I find that my
schedule can be somewhat variable, and sometimes I have access to a
resource at a time its context is scheduled closed and vice versa. I
typically handle this by clicking on the "include closed" box, however
this also brings in lots of other contexts that are scheduled to be
closed and are in fact closed. I can filter for just the context in
question but I can no longer easily compare tasks across multiple
*open* contexts and make a good decision about which one to do next. I
saw a suggestion about configuring contexts as "always open" or
"always closed" and scheduling a repeating reminder to flip it open or
flip it closed. This would be good for cases where I have little
ability to predict the actual schedule for a resource. In cases where
I can predict a schedule that's generally right with occasional
exceptions, this would cause the schedule to be lost whenever there's
an exception. Ideally I'd like to enter an override that would say
"@computer is open until 1AM" or @errands is closed today" and have
this override vanish when it expires.

In addition to these issues I'd love to hear from anyone else who has
found a way to make context schedules better match the availability of
real-world resources.

Thanks,
-Dwight

[Riaan Eloff]

I agree with what Dwight is saying.  Many of my contexts also share similar hours, and I would like to simply copy them across, or, even link them to each other.