Someday/maybe

[OmeWillem]

The 'Someday/maybe' list can be a pain. It's that bowl filled with game-changing ideas and potential glory, just waiting for the right time and place. The problem is, all those ideas are not well-defined projects yet. You just have to accept that someday/maybe is not really tangible yet. The list is vague and hazy by its very nature.

This nature of unclarity makes reviewing this list a bit difficult to me. When I look at my someday/maybe list, there are so many areas of responsibility it covers. So many directions it might lead to. So many altitudes too. That makes it hard for me to grasp the entire list and decide on the various items I have put there.

I have found a way to make the someday/maybe list a little more manageable. I use Remember The Milk, but what I came up with can be set up in the majority of list managers in the field. It's actually quite simple:

• First of all, I actually have a list called someday/maybe.
• I then look at my list and identify those items that are related in some sort of way, like area of responsibility, altitude etc. It should feel logical to see that shortlist of items grouped together. To this group of ideas I assign a recurring due date. (I use the due date in Remember The Milk as a date of review).
• After this I move on to the next group of related someday/maybe items and I give those a recurring due date a week after the first group.
• And so I move on down the list.
• Think about the recurring interval: you should have a group of someday/maybe items reviewed every week. So if you identify 6 groups of related items, well... you can do the math.

This way I let my list manager present me all someday/maybe items regularly. At the same time it is done in such a way that the list doesn't hit me like a random collection of wild ideas with no logic whatsoever.

Give it a try if you like. Good luck!

 

[Folke]

I also use a list for them, but just like you I no not like to look at that long consolidated list in some random order, so I too look at them one area of responsibility at a time.

And I vary the review frequency a lot, but since I am a bit "allergic" to soft timers, I make use of the app's priority colors instead, at the task level - low priority meaning quarterly review; medium priority meaning weekly review. I check off having reviewed each group of areas of responsibility one by one in the checklist (subtasks) that comes with the repeating review tasks. This means I can split up the review if I do not have the energy to do all groups of areas in one go.

But still quite similar to yours, I think! It is definitely worth the effort to differentiate that big list in order to make the reviewing more focused and pleasant!

 

[SiobhanBR]

Great idea to make your someday/maybe list work for you. I have two (work/personal) and they are kept in different systems.

My work S/M is a category in Outlook Tasks. I have my work areas of focus broken down into 7 areas and my S/M list entries begin with the corresponding letter A through G to represent one of those core 7 areas. This way they group together on my task list - so when I review the S/M of one area I can easily open all those "tasks" and look through them one by one, adjusting and deleting and promoting to active as I go.

My home S/M is in Evernote and I have one S/M notebook stack with several notebooks for different kinds of S/M: movies to watch, books to buy, gifts for me, gifts for others, general someday/maybe. During my weekly review I always look through the general someday/maybe but I don't need to cull my lists of things I may want to buy quite as often.

 

[Cpu_Modern]

I like the principle behind this. It is akin to when a major project plan gets reviewed mid trough the project. You do a review, you may re-plan some things and so on. All in the confines of a specific area. The geek in me also likes the automatization aspect of it.