But I like the part about GTD where I get it all out of my head and written down in a list. Even if I have to shuffle tasks towards the bottom of the list. I’m okay with some things never getting done. Life is too short (and getting shorter by the day). At least I’ve freed up my brain from worrying that I have forgotten something.
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I’m assuming you mean that you don’t check that list? The simple answer on digital tools is to add ‘Review someday list’ to your working list and add a repeatable reminder that works for you. Or add it to your calendar.
If its a matter of adding stuff to the list change its name. Someday doesn’t work for me, but backlog does. Create a list name that will make you put the items there and then develop a habit of checking it.
I totally agree. Perhaps the hardest process to adapt to is deleting tasks that might be good, but you’ll never have time to do.
I’m coming to the conclusion that digital apps have a weakness in making us write down too much. Warren Buffet is said to have no todo lists at all and working from memory. Although I’d imagine he has a PA who will remind him!
I always find that for me overwhelm comes from digital tools, not paper ones. Mark Forster also helped me in understanding that just because a task is on my list for today I may not have the psychological readiness to do it today. This is why pull works for me. I know this could make it easy to avoid certain difficult tasks and I have to deal with that, but my frame of mind to do certain tasks is not the same every day.
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The list title “backlog” speaks to me! Much better than “someday” or “maybe.” Thanks!
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Our own David Sparks calls this putting on your big boy/girl pants.
When you think about something, you should capture it to one of your inboxes (In my case Omnifocus.)
As you later process that Inbox, you have 4 options
- (My favourite) You no longer think you should or will do it. DELETE that action. Don’t think about it.
- it take less than 2 minutes DO it
- It takes longer than 2 minutes or you’re not able to do it now. DEFER it to later (add it to your calender, or added it to your someday/maybe list)
- Someone else should do it. DELEGATE it.
For true GTD completeness, it may be reference material which you should file somewhere you can find it later.
Then as part of my weekly review, I review my Someday/maybe list for actions which can be deleted. If (hand on heart) I’m going to choose not to do it, or it’s never going to happen then it’s gone, the only way this works is if you’re honest with yourself. (From a work perspective, some of these things I delete go on issue or risk registers to be picked up as part of our wider GRC programme.) During that weekly review, I also promote work from the Someday/Maybe list to become projects to be worked on.
When you’ve used an Inactive Tag in OF, that can work, but I still prefer a specific Someday/maybe list (whatever you call it) so that your day to day view isn’t cluttered with potential projects. If you know Agile, your Someday/Maybe is your unrefined Backlog items. I don’t flesh out a Project until it’s on deck.
I really like @mlevison’s Perspective for identifying stale items and I may steal it
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I use Backlog as a Tag for things I’ve not spec’d out yet.
Two funny details from the Agile world:
- Ideas are cheap - Future you always has a better understanding, than present you. So delete items frequently. If they’re still important, a better version of will be discovered later.
- Backlog - it’s a strange term. We create this queue of work before we start. The name implies we’re late before we begin.
Before I make it sound like I’m a saint (Jewish one at that), my Omnifocus database has tasks, who’s birthday’s I’ve celebrated.
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It’s unclear if you were replying to me directly, but the capture and inbox triage process you outlined is one I’ve been diligently performing for decades.
I may be in the minority, but I haven’t found a good way to manage my someday/maybe lists without cluttering up my existing lists in OmniFocus.
If I’m following you, @geoffaire, you use OF for your “backlog” list, right? If so, do you use a single-action project? Do you use OF’s ability to nest actions to organize it? And I’m guessing either (a) the project is paused or (b) you assign an inactive tag to each item on the someday list to keep its contents from cluttering up your other lists/perspectives, right? Related, what do you do with projects that your flushed out in OF but need to move back into your backlog?
Have you tried putting those list projects on hold? That gets them out of most views by default. The other thing I do is exclude projects in a certain folder from most perspectives. That lets the first available in those show as available to do, but only when I’m wanting to look at them. (In my case, I have a perspective that shows the first available from each project in that folder.)
Deleting/dropping is ideal, of course!
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Yes, I was replying to you.
Yes, I have a Someday maybe list, it’s a single action list which I keep on a single level.
Potential future actions and actions are placed on this Single Action List as an action, none of them are projects. If I have thoughts on breaking the action down into a project, this goes in the Notes field. There’s no point in spending too much time on something until I commit to it.
All actions have a Tag of @Backlog.
When I turn something into a project, the project gets a tag of Refined which means that I have a good idea what it will look like, then when I know it’s ready Ready to Work, then when I start it, Work in Progress. When it’s finished the project gets completed. My other project Status is Waiting
The point I was trying to make in my previous reply though is that deleting items from the Someday Maybe lists keeps it manageable.
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Another approach to riff on @cornchip - instead of making perspectives that exclude tags, I make perspectives that only include certain items.
My weekly plan is an example of this:
The key bit being the block in the middle: tagged with “Weekly Plan” or Has a due date in the recent past or next week.
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This is a helpful idea.
Perhaps this is just the nature of my work, but I often have semi fleshed out projects that I need to put on a someday/maybe list as they’re no longer a priority, but may resurface in the near future. I’ll experiment with creating a folder for these projects that I exclude from my primary perspectives.
This is a good idea! I may try something like this and use TaskPaper syntax in the notes field. I bet I could turn an action into a project and parse the notes as TaskPaper.
Thank you all for the helpful suggestions 
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This is really cool. I’m curious, do you tag items “Weekly Plan” during your weekly review? What do you do at the end of the week with items you didn’t get to? Do those get carried over to the next week or untagged and reevaluated?
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One of my issues with digital task management (and I’m clear it’s a personal problem) is that I always write down too many tasks because it’s easy to do so and seems logical. The friction of paper is I write down less making it easier to manage.
Does anyone else have this issue with digital and do you have any helpful guidelines you use to stop you adding too many tasks?
I’m including in this the question of how many tasks you add to a project and whether you just add the next task or every task you can think of about the project.
Yes the items are tagged during my weekly review (for the most part). Occasionally, during the week, I will add something critical and tag for the current week. I also have a tag called “Shelf” modeled on David Spark’s bench. Shelf is for items that are likely next.
Like most people, some items don’t get done in the current week. In the weekly review I decide if they stay tagged for the current week. My biggest discovery is usually that the item is unclear. I try to rewrite those items.
The other that helps is reviewing two Omnifocus “Projects” a day to keep them fresh, max 5 minutes a day.
For most of my projects, I track only the next action. Nothing else.
To keep projects from stalling, I use a perspective that lists every project without a next action:
I check it at the end of each workday and add a next action to any project that shows up.
I’ve worked this way for about ten years, and it’s worked reasonably well. It’s a change from how I started. When I first got into GTD in the early 2000s, I used to brain-dump every task I could think of for a project, in order. As you might imagine, that list quickly became unwieldy.
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+1
Because my default job was support, a task to me was usually something with a due date. Everything else was a reminder. In the early days a task might be a post-it note or an item on a white board. Reminders were written in my paper planner. Later they moved to a calendar or some other app.
Today I’m retired and the majority of my tasks arrive as email in the Gmail app on my iPhone or iPad. I handle these immediately or assign them to a task with a couple of taps. Everything else, items to purchase, etc. land in Apple Reminders.
Both lists are visible in widgets on the Home Screen of my iPad and iPhone, daring me to forget something 
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It very much depends on the project for me
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for the type of project I perform regularly, I have taskpaper templates in Shortcuts to create projects with defined steps and often relative dates (to the due date) for completion of each section of the checklists. E.g. if I have to conduct Info Sec due diligence on a potential new supplier or product, I regularly complete the same actions.
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Projects where I have a good idea of the steps where I’ll spec out the milestones of the project up front and add Sub tasks as required.
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more vague projects where I may be making it up as I go where I add actions as they occur to me
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I do the same, but due to the fact that it only happens rarely, I check weekly as part of my weekly review. the same as checking for Projects which are waiting for actions by others, for any projects I’ve manually put on hold, and any projects without specific tags I like to ensure are populated.
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That issue and the issue of many of my projects and tasks being dependent on weather and/or sheep attitudes is why I ended up dumping Omnifocus for an Obsidian based combined task/project/management/notepad/reference/library system.
While not ideally suited for some of those types of items the lack of friction because everything is in one place more than makes up for some level of “clunkyness” in the system, at least for me.
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