How to decide if a project should be on the projects list or on someday/maybe

folke123

Registered
Hi!

I am having some trouble deciding/understanding how to decide on whether some projects should go on my projects list or on my someday/maybe list.

Some things are easy:
Something I want/need to do and are going to work on soonish --> project list
Something I don't know if I want to do --> Someday/Maybe list

But what about things I would like to get done, but don't know when I would find the time to do them?
Maybe I will find the time to clean the garage this week, but maybe it won't get done until fall. How should I decide if this project (that I want to do) should be on my someday/maybe list or my active projects list. I might work on it soon, I might not.

I guess I am being confused between some people saying that if you are not working on a project right now (or think that you will be working on it in the next week/review cycle) move it to someday/maybe. And the book/some people saying that as long as it is something you are committed to doing and it takes less than a year it should be an active project
 

Gardener

Registered
But what about things I would like to get done, but don't know when I would find the time to do them?
Maybe I will find the time to clean the garage this week, but maybe it won't get done until fall. How should I decide if this project (that I want to do) should be on my someday/maybe list or my active projects list. I might work on it soon, I might not.

I guess I am being confused between some people saying that if you are not working on a project right now (or think that you will be working on it in the next week/review cycle) move it to someday/maybe. And the book/some people saying that as long as it is something you are committed to doing and it takes less than a year it should be an active project

I see this as being related to the clutter threshold concept (which I note is NOT my term, it comes from A Slob comes Clean).

I think that if your clutter threshold is very high, you can put all the projects you're committed to doing in your active lists.

And if it's very low, you have nothing but what you absolutely plan to do in the next week or two in your active lists--and maybe even less than that; maybe you have only half of that and then mid-week when some stuff is done, you have a miniature mid-weekly review to reload your active lists.

And if you're in between, I would suggest that you start as if you're very low, then slowly add projects to your active lists until you find that it's threatening to get out of control. And then you back off a little.
 

mcogilvie

Registered
To just add a little to what Gardiner has written, some people move stuff in and out of Someday-Maybe without much thought. For others, it is like Caesar crossing the Rubicon or picking the day of the Normandy landings. I don’t think either behavior is wrong per se, but reflects one’s personal situation and preferences. Because I use digital tools, I find it easy to set a tickler for a future date to consider questions such as “Resume work on Project X?”
 

Oogiem

Registered
But what about things I would like to get done, but don't know when I would find the time to do them?
Maybe I will find the time to clean the garage this week, but maybe it won't get done until fall. How should I decide if this project (that I want to do) should be on my someday/maybe list or my active projects list. I might work on it soon, I might not.
It depends on how you want to work and your tolerance for long lists of actions where you might not get any of them done.

I like long lists, I also have many of my someday/maybe projects that require that they be worked on during a specific season or at least started in that season, and contrary to most GTD practitioners, I have projects that can span years. I put in my active list anything that I could work on this eason (3 months) that isn't blocked by some other condition or project. At the end of the quarter I do a detailed review, put a bunch of them back onto my someday/maybe list and get out the next set.

I actually have just exactly your example, clean out one corner of the garage where we've been storing boxes from my mother's estate for over 20 years. It's a fall and winter job. It's been on my list to get started in October of every year. Basically, I had other things to do that were more important and had priority or I was not able to mentally face the issue. This year, my stepdad is here with us a lot due to COVID and so we decided that together we'd tackle the job since it's fraught with emotional attachments. We did a box every day or 2 and guesss what. The boxes are all sorted, happy memories relived and things either incorporated into our house for use or given away. I was ok with the project being in someday/maybe for years. I was also ok with putting it on my active list and seeing it every week during the fall and winter for review and I was ok with putting it back into someday/maybe when I did my March review because it was only a seasonal task. Eventually it got done.

I separate my someday/maybe from my main task manager specifically to force me to stop and think both about putting something in the active group and when putting something back. That extra "friction" and extra steps mean I think more carefully about the whole project so I take better notes to get me going again easily when I do start it and in a few cases I've decided that in fact, I was NEVER going to do the project and felt ok deleting it entirely.

So figure out how you work and adjust where things live accordingly.
 

Jared Caron

Nursing leader; GTD enthusiast
Hi!

I am having some trouble deciding/understanding how to decide on whether some projects should go on my projects list or on my someday/maybe list.

Some things are easy:
Something I want/need to do and are going to work on soonish --> project list
Something I don't know if I want to do --> Someday/Maybe list

But what about things I would like to get done, but don't know when I would find the time to do them?
Maybe I will find the time to clean the garage this week, but maybe it won't get done until fall. How should I decide if this project (that I want to do) should be on my someday/maybe list or my active projects list. I might work on it soon, I might not.

I guess I am being confused between some people saying that if you are not working on a project right now (or think that you will be working on it in the next week/review cycle) move it to someday/maybe. And the book/some people saying that as long as it is something you are committed to doing and it takes less than a year it should be an active project
Admittedly, there is no clear line between these.

As others have said it really does depend on your preferences for your project list. I know a lot of people have an in-between list, like "projects on hold" or something.

I tend to make an intuitive/gut decision on these things during the weekly review. As I review my project list, I'm thinking about when and how I'll do the work, or if it's something I even want to do right now. Generally, my criteria are something like:
1. how committed am I to finishing this?
2. is it time-sensitive?
3. am i accountable to someone else for this?
4. is having this on my project list helping me or distracting me?
 
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