http://www.izzetsafer.com/taskboundaries/taskboundaries.html

Geez Michael, why do you always ask the tricky questions

I agree with you that this is an important use case. Both for newcommers, who may forget to activate a new task, and for seasoned users, who may not know that something warrants a new task until they’re part way through the original. I like your suggestion of a “context trace” as a way to address this problem.

The trouble is that identifying and proposing a solution to this problem involved an entire Master’s Thesis by Izzet Safer. Thankfully Izzet did make some good progress, and I recommend flipping through the screenshots in the thesis, and the surrounding text, in oder to get a sense for his timeline and keyframe style solution to this problem. I’ll also ping him to re-post the flash movie that he had of this.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/grads/resources/thesis/May07/Safer_Izzet.pdf

There are also two Mylyn bugs open around this:

146125: provide mechanism for reassociating previous interaction with a new task

115498: [discussion] rewind and replay of context capture

Thanks for posting your ideas, and please consider sharing any other UI facilities you think would be helpful for this. I hope that we get around to providing some additional context manipulation features of this sort in the Galileo cycle. In the meantime, the current best work-around is to right click on the task -> Context -> Copy to… -> select the task and manually remove unneeded things from the new context using the popup menu on the corresponding elements.

I love Mylyn, but one of the things that makes the task oriented workflow difficult for me is, that I sometimes switch to a new task without realizing it. It is a non conscious process. It takes a while until I realize that I work on a new task. But when I realize it, I have already “polluted” my current task with context of the new task. In retrospect, most of the time I know quite well, when I started getting side-tracked into a new task….

If there would be a way to see the “trace of context” on a time line and I could click into the time line and say: “here I started a new task”. And that would split the context. The old context remains unpolluted and the new context contains does not start empty.

I think one of the reasons, I create new tasks less often than I should is because the new context starts with nothing, or I have to copy the entire old context into the new one.

Allowing a smooth migration to new tasks would really help (me )