I don't get up in the morning looking forward to the property tax notice

The electricity bill and the gas bill are sitting on my desk. Both are paid, from the app on my phone, then scanned and filed. All that is left is to throw them away. I don’t get up in the morning looking forward to filing the property tax notice. It still has to happen, otherwise the piles get bigger and eventually expensive.

In the last Q&A call I was asked what this “Admin” context actually is that I keep in my lists. Kay filed it under “Beyond GTD”, as something that is not in the method as such. Christian first thought of elevated permissions when he heard “Admin”. Paul Martin suggested “back office” as a term. The argument about the word is harmless, the thing behind it is not: my context lists have long stopped being named after a place or a tool, and are named after the kind of time a task needs.

Why place and tool no longer sort anything

A context has exactly one job: to exclude. It should make sure that in a given moment I only see the entries I can actually do right now. That is precisely what the classic contexts no longer deliver. I carry my office around with me, in the shape of a laptop. So the split between “office” and “laptop” does not help me, it just produces two lists with the same content.

With the phone it was the same, only earlier. My list stopped being called “phone” a long time ago and became “mobile”, because I do far more with the device than make calls. Today it is called “communication”. On it is everything that involves a second person: make an appointment with the GP, sort out after-school care, call someone and agree a date. At work a Teams message is exactly the same thing. For me communication is a block, not a device.

What is left, once place and tool exclude nothing, is the state I am in. Do I have half an hour of remaining strength between two meetings, or do I have an uninterrupted hour of quiet? That is what I sort by.

Three lists, three block sizes

List	What is on it	Time block	Size (roughly, in my case)
Admin	Small stuff that has to happen: scan an invoice, raise a standing order, file a notice	30 minutes, daily	around 18 entries
Focus	Bigger chunks that will definitely get done and need room	around 1 hour, three times a week	a handful
Creative	Bigger chunks I am genuinely looking forward to	around 1 hour, twice a week	a handful
Communication	anything that involves someone else	no block of its own	varies

Admin is the stuff nobody feels like doing and that still has to move forward a little every day. If I still had an assistant, I would hand a lot of it over. I don’t, so it gets a fixed half-hour slot. In half an hour you get surprisingly far with small stuff.

Focus and Creative are both “big”; the difference is motivation. Focus has to happen and only needs the room for it. Creative is the things I look forward to: working a natural planning model through for a private project, defining a method properly. That is exactly why they must not simply slip in between, otherwise I eat the nice things first and the property tax notice stays where it is.

The calendar block is the mechanism, not the list

Tasks do not belong in the calendar. An admin block does not break that rule, because it is not a task. It is an empty container with a time on it. What I put into it I decide when I open it, not when I create it. An appointment for a specific task is lost when it falls through. A container is only capacity, and capacity can be moved.

Two properties make the block work. Its length: I don’t want to do admin work for two hours straight, I would never start. Thirty minutes I will start. And its bindingness: move it if you must, cancel it never. If you don’t have the time to get things done, your lists will not get shorter, no matter how cleanly they are sorted.

Where this construction does not hold

I think the setup is good, but two things about it are wrong, and both only became clear to me during the call.

First, it is not a sort by energy, it is a sort by the length of block required. Focus and Creative demand the same concentration and the same hour; they differ only in whether I feel like it. It would be more honest to have a half-hour list and an hour list plus a marker for appetite. Naming it that way gets you to the real question faster: how much contiguous time does this entry need, and do I have it today?

Second, during the call I said that everything on the focus list will definitely get done and in the foreseeable future. Hendrik then asked where the difference to Someday/Maybe lies. My answer was: bungee jumping is on Someday/Maybe and may be deleted at any time, the documents for a court hearing are on Focus, with deadlines and money attached. That is a clean answer to the wrong question. Because “I am definitely doing this” is not a context, it is a commitment decision. What I have done there is build a second axis into the context layer. It works for me because I carry both axes in my head. Anyone adopting the structure sorts by feel, and the focus list fills up with everything that sounds important.

And one more thing needs putting straight: energy is not an extension of the method. It is one of the criteria GTD uses to decide what you do in a given moment, on equal footing with context, time available and priority. The only new thing about my solution is that I take that criterion out of the head decision and build it into the structure of the lists. That is not a deviation, it is a materialisation.

Where this typically fails

• The lists get renamed, the blocks never get entered. Then only the label has changed. The structure carries nothing, the calendar carries.
• The admin block is set too long. Nobody sustains two hours of small stuff. The block becomes the place where you hide from the real work behind trivia.
• The focus list holds sub-projects instead of next actions. “Get a valuation for the old estate car” was the disputed case in the call. For one participant a clear next action, because he drives to the dealer he trusts. For me a sub-project, because I would first have to research what that even means. An hour-long block is worth nothing if the entry cannot be finished within that hour.
• The block gets cancelled instead of moved. An appointment with yourself that has been cancelled once is cancelled more easily the second time.
• Focus becomes the collection point for everything important. When it holds thirty entries at an hour each, the list is a calculation that does not add up. Then two honest routes remain: delete, or tell whoever is waiting that it is not happening. Both are unpleasant, both are better than a list that lies.

Common questions

What are GTD contexts by energy?

They are context lists named not after a place or a tool, but after the state and the amount of time a task demands. Typical names are Admin for small-scale work, Focus for concentrated work and Creative for tasks that need appetite and room. The purpose is the same as with classic contexts: in a concrete moment, to see only what is actually doable now.

How many context lists should I keep?

Enough that each list can be taken in fully in a real moment, and few enough that no two lists hold the same content. If two lists are always relevant together, they belong merged. If a list gets so long that you stop reading it to the end, it is no longer a selection aid, it is an archive.

Is an admin block the same as time blocking?

No, and the difference matters in practice. In classic time blocking a specific task gets a specific time, and if the slot falls through, the task is undone and the calendar entry worthless. An admin block only reserves capacity; the selection happens when the block opens. That is why it survives disruption without anything having to be rescheduled.

How do I separate the focus list from Someday/Maybe?

By commitment, not by task size. Someday/Maybe holds what could be deleted without anyone noticing, and what comes up for reconsideration in the weekly review. The focus list holds what is tied to a promise, a deadline or a consequence. If you cannot decide where an entry belongs, it is the commitment behind it that is unclear, not the list.

What do I do if I have no time for blocks like these at all?

Then that is the result of the reflection, not an argument against the structure. Someone who sits in meetings from nine to five every day has no time to get things done, and no ordering of lists will change that. The next action in that case is a conversation with your manager or your team, not a new way of sorting.

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Take your longest context list and, for one week, write just one number after every entry: the minutes it needs in one go. After seven days you will see whether your problem is your list or your calendar.