A someday maybe list is the shelf that holds everything you genuinely want to do and cannot start now. Not a backlog, not the wish list living in a notes app you last opened in March. A named place, reviewed on a schedule, that exists so those items stop competing with this week's work for your attention.
The shouting is the point. Something you want and have not started keeps surfacing at inconvenient moments, and the standard response is to write it on the active list where it gets skipped instead. Fourteen skips later, skipping has become normal, and the damage is not to that item — it is to your trust in every other line on the list.
Why parking something works, and when it doesn't
Unfinished goals are noisy by default. In a 2011 paper, Masicampo and Baumeister activated unfulfilled goals in participants and found they produced intrusive thoughts during an unrelated reading task, made goal-related words more mentally accessible, and worsened performance on an unrelated anagram task. Then they let people write a specific plan for the goal. The interference effects went away, and the goal was still unfinished. Their framing is that once a plan is made, the drive to attain the goal is suspended and resumed at the time the plan specifies.
A someday item is not a plan in that sense. Nobody writes a step-by-step for "learn to sail". What it can carry is the second half of the mechanism: a specified later time. That is the load-bearing part of the shelf, and it explains the common failure exactly — a someday list with no review date behaves like no list at all, because nothing was suspended, only hidden.
So the rule underneath everything below: an item goes on the shelf together with the date you will next look at it. If your weekly review already opens the shelf, the date can be implicit. If it doesn't, the shelf is a drawer.
What actually belongs there
Most someday lists are wrong in one direction: they collect things that are really unscheduled next actions, and they miss the things that are really open decisions. Here is a real triage pass over eight lines, with the verdict for each.
| the line as written | verdict | where it goes instead |
|---|---|---|
| learn to sail | genuine someday | shelf, reviewed quarterly |
| replace the kitchen tap | not someday, just unscheduled | next action with a start date in April |
| read Piranesi | not a task | a reading list held as reference |
| move to Lisbon | an open decision, not a project | shelf, but reviewed with a question attached |
| redo the personal site | someday that has been someday for three years | delete, or shrink to "buy the domain" |
| get the bike serviced | avoided, not deferred | next action this week, ten minutes |
| write the long piece about maps | genuine someday | shelf, with the three notes attached |
| learn German | too big to be an item | shelf as a decision; the project would be "book a first lesson" |
Two patterns fall out of that pass. Things with a physical first step under ten minutes are almost never someday — they are avoided, and moving them to the shelf launders avoidance as strategy. And the biggest items are usually decisions wearing a project's clothes. "Move to Lisbon" has no next action because you have not decided, and the shelf is the right home for it only if the review asks the decision out loud.
The reverse mistake is subtler. Reference material — the article about sailing schools, the note with the tap model number — gets filed on the someday list because there is nowhere else for it. That is the leak how to pick an app for GTD covers in full, and it turns the shelf into a mixed drawer of intentions and evidence.
Build the shelf in twenty minutes
- Make one list and name it plainly. Someday, or the shelf, or later. Not "ideas" — ideas is a bin nobody triages.
- Walk your active list top to bottom and move out anything you will not start in the next four weeks. Do not evaluate whether it is a good idea. Only whether it is startable soon.
- For each moved item, ask whether the first physical step takes under ten minutes. If yes, it goes back on the active list today rather than onto the shelf.
- Split what remains into two groups: things waiting on time or money, and things waiting on a decision. Tag them differently, because they get reviewed differently.
- Attach the material. If there is a link, a photo or a note that belongs with the item, put it with the item now, while you remember where it is.
- Write the review cadence on the list itself. Weekly for the time-and-money group, monthly or quarterly for decisions.
- Delete three things before you finish. There is always something on there you stopped wanting in 2023, and deleting it teaches the list that removal is allowed.
Step seven is the one people skip, and it is the one that keeps the shelf readable. A list you never subtract from stops being scanned within about two months.
The fourth-review rule
This is the mechanism that keeps a shelf honest without asking you to make a judgment call. Every time you read an item during a review and do nothing with it, it earns a mark. On the fourth mark, it gets one of exactly two outcomes: promoted to a real project with a next action, or deleted.
No third option. No "keep it, it's nice to have". The reason to be rigid is that the marks measure something real — four consecutive reviews where the item was in front of you, available, and you chose otherwise. That is data about what you want, and it is more reliable than what you think you want on the day you write it down.
In practice about a third of a shelf clears out on its first pass through the rule, which is uncomfortable and then a relief. The cost is real: you will delete two things you later wish you had kept, and the answer is that they will come back, because things you actually want do.
Where the shelf sits relative to everything else
The shelf only pays off if the weekly review opens it. Five minutes at the end, described in the GTD weekly review checklist, is enough for a shelf of thirty items. Anything promoted off it needs rewriting into a startable step before it goes anywhere near today — that rewrite is a skill, and how to write a next actions list is the whole procedure.
Going the other way, the shelf is where inbox processing sends the third category of captured thing: not an action, not reference, but wanted later. Processing the GTD inbox covers the decision that puts it there. In David Allen's five-step loop — capture, clarify, organise, reflect, engage — someday items are created during clarify and only ever touched again during reflect.
Where init.Tasks fits
On iOS, macOS and web, init.Tasks keeps to-dos, personal projects and the material that goes with them inside one terminal-styled tree. The someday shelf there is a first-class view sitting beside today, next 7 days, upcoming and the logbook — not a tag you invent and then have to remember to filter out of everything else.
That distinction is the whole parking problem. Notes, links and images attach to anything, so a shelved item carries its own evidence and you are not re-finding the sailing school link in eighteen months. And with start date and deadline held as separate fields, something coming off the shelf as "could start in April" never has to pretend April is a due date to stay visible.
The AI connection is coming in september, mostly useful here for the boring pass: ask a connected assistant to list every someday item older than a year and the fourth-review rule enforces itself without you reading anything. It is in private beta rather than on sale; the waitlist is open and everything is free while in beta.
FAQ
What is a someday maybe list?
A someday maybe list is a specific list in Getting Things Done holding anything you might want to do but are not committed to now — trips, skills, purchases, ideas for projects. It sits outside the active project and next-action lists so it never competes with this week's work, and it is reviewed on a schedule rather than continuously.
What belongs on a someday maybe list?
Things you want, cannot start in the next month, and would regret losing. Not things whose first step takes ten minutes, which are being avoided rather than deferred. Not reference material, which belongs with the project it serves. Open decisions do belong there, as long as the review asks the decision rather than re-reading the item.
How often should you review a someday maybe list?
Weekly for anything waiting on time or money, because those unblock without warning. Monthly or quarterly for decisions, because reading a decision every seven days trains you to skip it. The cadence matters less than it being written down somewhere other than your memory.
Does a someday list just become a graveyard?
It does, unless subtraction is built in. The fix is a rule that runs without judgment: mark an item each time a review passes over it untouched, and on the fourth mark either promote it to a project with a real next step or delete it. A shelf that only grows stops being read, which makes it identical to not having one.