What is layered context?

Layered context is a concept in personal epistemology: When multiple contexts are active simultaneously identify which one is primary.

Example: You're on a video call with your team discussing a product launch while simultaneously holding: a message from your child's school that arrived two minutes ago, a performance review you need to write by end of day, and a growing awareness that the architecture decision you made last week might be wrong. Each of these is a context — a frame with its own rules, stakes, and expected behavior. You're operating in all four at once, but you can only respond well in one. The meeting gets a distracted version of you. The school message gets anxiety instead of action. The review gets postponed again. The architecture doubt loops without resolution. Four contexts loaded, zero contexts served well. The fix is not to care less about three of them. The fix is to identify which one is primary right now, give it full attention, and explicitly park the others in a trusted system.

This concept is part of Phase 9 (Context Sensitivity) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for context sensitivity.