Both those extremes and all in between go into a curated list of Someday?maybe Items that you look at regularly. for me I look at my S/M lists (I have 64 of them) quarterly for sure and whenever I feel a need to check out an area or a particular list.
First 2 go into Someday/Maybe Last one gets created as a project and moved to active status.
Get in the habift of putting them in a specific set of notes you can get to easily.
True, IMO Someday/Maybe does notbelong in a task manager. Some people do keep them in there but inactive, fo rme it’s too much hassle to do that.
Put everything that is a task into the task manager for current projects, yes the fun ones too.
So don’t put them in there and to the next point domn’t refer to them weekly at least that’s way too often for me.
Here’s an example of some of my Someday/Maybe lists. I started with a generic Things to Write list and it evolved into a more specific list so I can choose what I want to do when I decide to activate any given project based on how much time I can spend on it or how I feel and how urgent it is. Now I have these lists which all revolve around Writing. I split the General list items off into a separate list when I have enough items of the same type. That number for me is about 20, at that point I’d rather see it in a separate list than in one big long one.
[[General_Writing_Projects]]
[[Blog_Posts_To_Write]] For my Farm or Personal Blogs
[[Sheep_Newsletter_Articles_To_Write]] For the Sheep Associaiotn newsletter
[[Household_Inventory_Stories_To_Write]] Stories about our special posessions
[[Writing_NaNo_Novels]]
[[novel_scene_snippets]]
[[Song_Parody_Lyrics_To_Write]]
[[Environmental_Essays_To_Write]]
[[Farming_Essays_To_Write]]
[[AnimalTrakker_Video_Scripts_To_Write]]
The Wiki Links are becuase these are all links to notes in my Obsidian system
I know that right now the only things I am working on are coding, database design, lambing and irrigation. So I have no need to look at any of the writing lists at all. In June at my quarterly review I’ll take a look and I may actually do some of the AnimalTrakker ones before then as coding slows down.
I strongly dislike “someday/maybe” because in my mind (sounds like yours as well) it might as well be labeled “never, until I discover the list and then search for the other related lists, and holy moley I’ve written this book down like 20 times, this time I’ll star it and put it in my task manager and have it take up space there”
I have no real answer except to make a recurring task that says “pick a book from your list” or “review your notes.” Then create my file structures pretty flat for the stuff I want to see. I can’t drill my life too far down into folders or whatever, then stuff will get lost.
It depends how many tools you want to use. I keep my possible reading/watching list in Reminders, which is also my task manager. I keep them in a specific project, without due dates. I only look at that project if I actually am looking for a book/article to read or, perhaps, if I’m bored in a queue and feel like tidying the list by removing anything now irrelevant.
If I do want to actively read something I flag it and it immediately goes onto my current to do list.
It’s not really much different to having an “Annual Tax Return” folder on your Mac which you only look into when you’re actively doing taxes or have a query.
I think the exact opposite is true. The OP is recognising that not everything can be tamed with an explicit set of rules, no matter how complex, or simple.
Sometimes rules just don’t work, either because the problem fights them, or the person fights them. To me the problem to be solved is what tools can be used to tame the ‘analogue’ nature of this problem?
I barely use task managers these days, but I’m fairly sure I used one at some point that tackled the “maybe one day”, “some day”, “soon” kind of continuum by surfacing these basic categories on some kind of regular basis. I wish I could remember what it was.
Personally, I find trying to use task managers to keep my life in order like following a recipe for every meal. Sometimes you just gotta look in the fridge.
For something like that, I just stick it in Things 3 under videos (or whatever) I want to follow up on. So it is there and I look at it periodically but hardly all the time, just when I am looking for something to watch.
Thank you all for your inspiring answers! It’s good to see I’m not the only one with these questions and that there is obviously not one „right“ way. I guess I will aim for some middle ground where I keep notes for stuff that are certainly not specific tasks yet, but some repeating task (however long the interval, that can be adapted over time) to make me look at those notes.
I will need to look at the fine line between to much and to little tasks. I tend to put less and less in my task management system, making it hold only stuff that I dislike and want to make sure I’m not repressing. This way it becomes something that I don’t like to use. Then I make a fresh start and put in so many little things or things I might want to do but won’t find the time anyway, so that it becomes bloated and impractical. So this time I will find the right balance! I will.
This comment about the task manager being full of tasks you dislike reminded me of @beck 's neat post about writing tasks as messages of kindness: Kinder To Do Lists — I am Beck Tench
Thanks, that’s an interesting article. I once read this book called „The war of art“ and it’s about this force that is trying to keep you away from being productive and creative. The author has this concept of his whole life being a war against this force and how he is fighting battles every day. It was kind of inspiring and interesting, but in the end I found it pretty depressing and decided that I wouldn’t want to see my creative life in such an aggressive way. That approach in the article is just the opposite. I’m not sure it fits my character to make so many polite words to myself, but I will certainly consider the idea behind that.
Also, I’ll probably switch back to OmniFocus as I’m revisiting my task management and there I could set up custom review cycles for stuff that is not that important and not so likely to be done soon. I could review these things just twice a year or so, just to make sure they don’t get forgotten at all. Right now I do a review in Things every week and I keep getting annoyed by that as this frequent reviewing shows me the same items again and again. So sometimes I skip it because I know there is nothing new in there since last week. But of course that is nothing that I should hold in my head. So if I have different cycles for different kinds of tasks I think the reviewing process will be much more efficient and less annoying. But of course this can get pretty complex soon and then the whole process of setting up different types of review cycles and everything will again become bloated and I’m here once more asking for advice :).
I read Getting Things Done several years ago and have fought back against this exasperation of ‘what goes where?’ many times. I started gravitating toward a more Cal Newport style system until I realized there’s more similarity than Newport would likely be willing to acknowledge. I have been rethinking my own system during a break in classes.
I recently discovered these podcast episodes by David Allen and crew about managing projects (of the David Allen definition) and have found them very thought provoking, informative, and empowering. I think many people, me included, have taken Allen very literally when he says a project is anything with two or next actions. He pushes back against this in the third episode. He gives advice on what really should be considered while determining if it’s a project, an idea, or an ongoing area of focus.
I would suggest that he never intended task management to be the unwieldy system many of us have constructed and reconstructed over and over again. I can hear his voice saying only as complicated as you need but no more.
Just to throw in my 2 cents. For items like books to read or movies to watch, I create lists in Obsidian and tag them with “weekly”. So part of my weekly review is to look at all the lists with this tag and only when I decide to actually read or watch something in the coming week, will I pull the book or movie into Things. I just find it better not to clutter my task manager with things I won’t be doing for a long time (or ever).
I have a someday/maybe list in Apple Reminders, and tag things there such as #museum or #restaurant or #road_trip, #photo_sites, and so on. It is a mainly dormant list until I want to do something in one of the categories I assigned on the list -– such as, obviously, go to a museum, or out to dinner with friends, or a photo shoot. When planning those things I look at my list and see if there’s anything that interests me at that time.
I never put time-bound things on the someday/maybe list -– like “go to Whitney Biennial”. Those things get assigned a reminder dated a month before the event in a different ‘tickler’ list.
Success with any kind of list, tasks or otherwise, depends on a consistent practice of reviewing lists, or notes, or wherever it is that one notes interesting things.
Probably for another thread… but loving ourselves/being kinder to ourselves in both task management and productivity in general is important.
It’s easy for productivity systems and apps to be “efficient”, but we’re humans, not machines and therefore any definition of efficiency has to include some sense of our need for wellbeing.
Reading @beck ’s post further, the Future Self Compassion is helpful in that it puts the ideas/tasks/books/articles into some context. As reading lists build up, they often become disconnected from the reason I wanted to read the book in the fist place (eg recommendation, a core idea that appealed, direct relevance to some work).
By providing that as part of the title it becomes much easier to assess priorities e.g., I’m meeting Bob next week so best skim the book he recommended to me but I’d put to one side.
My simple solution that has worked for me for the past eight years is a weekly recurring task in OmniFocus to review a Someday/Maybe list.
I keep this separate from my weekly review, but it literally takes me 5 minutes a week to review, edit, curate and elevate anything I want to become actionable.
I tried having separate ‘ someday lists’ for different areas however there was too much overhead / friction and now I just have one someday maybe list but with different headings.
I did try having the someday list in omnifocus as a list of single actions but I found this too cluttered.
I do have something in my someday list that has been in there since inception
Good luck.
I’ve had items on my mental to-do list for so long that technology has rendered them obsolete. The oldest idea I can remember which would still have merit is, I think, approaching 20 years. Still not sure how to do it, either.
