There’s a category of ideas that doesn’t belong on your to-do list but keeps ending up there anyway.

“Start a podcast.” “Read that book on pricing.” “Look into hiring a part-time bookkeeper.” “Try that new content distribution approach.”

These aren’t tasks for this week. They’re real possibilities — things you might do when the timing is right, when the current priorities shift, when a specific resource opens up.

Without a designated home, they pile up in your inbox where they cause guilt every time you scroll past them, live on sticky notes that disappear, or land on your task list where they compete with actual commitments. The result is the mental noise of open loops — not too much work, just too many unprocessed possibilities.

The GTD Someday/Maybe list solves this. It’s one of the most underused parts of David Allen’s Getting Things Done framework — and for business owners managing multiple priorities, it’s often the piece that makes the whole productivity framework feel complete.

Here’s how it works and how to make it genuinely useful rather than a holding pen you never return to.

What the GTD Someday/Maybe List Is

The Someday/Maybe list is a dedicated holding area for ideas and possibilities you can’t or won’t act on now, but don’t want to lose. It’s a core part of the GTD system — sitting between your active projects and the rubbish bin.

The critical distinction: it holds things you are not committed to yet. The moment something becomes a real project with a next action, it leaves the Someday/Maybe list and enters your active system.

David Allen describes it as a trusted “parking lot” — organised, reviewed on a set cadence, and trusted enough that your brain can release those ideas without the low-level anxiety that they’ll be forgotten. That trust is what makes it work. Without it, the list becomes another place you deposit things and never open again.

When the list is working well, reading through it during a review session feels like a conversation with a past version of yourself — ideas that still have life, ideas that have run their course, and occasionally one that’s suddenly exactly right for this moment.

What Belongs on It (and What Doesn’t)

The list is only useful if the items on it are real maybes. Here’s how to distinguish them.

Good Someday/Maybe candidates

• Business ideas you’re not pursuing yet (“launch a referral programme,” “build a membership tier”)
• Books, courses, and resources to explore when you have bandwidth
• Projects that are real but not a current priority (“rebuild the onboarding email sequence”)
• Connections to re-establish when the moment is right
• Tools or systems worth investigating (“trial a different CRM,” “test a new reporting tool”)
• Personal goals and experiences you intend to pursue in time

What doesn’t belong

• Things you’re actually committed to — those go in your project list with a real next action
• Vague anxiety-dumps that aren’t specific possibilities (“sort out the finances,” “fix the website”)
• Wishes that aren’t genuine maybes — if you’d never actually do it, drop it now

The test: if you read an item in three months during a review and couldn’t decide whether to keep it or drop it in thirty seconds, it probably shouldn’t be there. Every entry needs to be specific enough to act on if you chose to.

How to Set Up Your Someday/Maybe List

The simplest setup works in any tool you’re already using — Asana, Notion, a plain text file, or a physical notebook. The tool matters less than the habit.

Four steps to get started

1. Create one dedicated section. Keep it completely separate from your active project list. Call it “Someday/Maybe”, “One Day”, or “Parking Lot” — whatever sticks. Never mix it with current commitments.

2. Do a single capture sweep. What ideas have you been meaning to pursue? What projects keep getting pushed to “next quarter”? What would you do if you had two free weeks? Get everything out in one session — treat it like a brain dump into a trusted container.

3. Write each item as a specific possibility. “Start a referral programme” is workable. “Think about growth” is not — it’s not a real thing you could act on when you come back to it.

4. Date every entry. Knowing when something was added tells you whether it’s been sitting three weeks or three years. Items that accumulate without movement are usually reveals: they were always wishes, not real intentions.

The Review Habit That Keeps It Alive

A Someday/Maybe list without a review cadence turns into a graveyard. The review is what separates a useful parking lot from another digital pile of good intentions.

The GTD weekly review is where you keep it alive. Once a week — most people build this into a Friday afternoon or Sunday morning — open the list and ask three questions per item:

1. Is this still a genuine possibility, or has it run its course?
2. Has something changed that makes this the right moment to move it into active projects?
3. Is there any small next action worth taking now, even just a five-minute research step?

If an item is dead, delete it without guilt. If it’s still real but not now, leave it and move on. If the timing has arrived, pull it into your project list and give it a concrete next action — and if you’re unsure how to process new items, the 5 Ds framework gives you a fast triage decision for anything that lands in your system.

The weekly pass keeps the list clean. A monthly or quarterly pass is where the bigger prioritisation happens — stepping back and asking what you want to promote from “maybe” to “yes, this quarter.”

Using Claude to Triage the List

A Someday/Maybe list grows quickly. Within a few months you can easily have sixty or eighty items across business ideas, personal goals, learning resources, and operational projects.

A monthly Claude session handles the triage efficiently. Paste the full list and give Claude the context it needs: what your current priorities are, what you’re already committed to this quarter, and what capacity you realistically have. Then ask it to:

• Group items by category (business, personal, learning, operations)
• Flag items added more than ninety days ago with no sign of movement
• Identify two or three items that might be worth promoting to an active project given your current situation

Claude doesn’t decide — you do. But the grouping and age-flag turn a seventy-item review into a ten-minute task rather than a thirty-minute slog.

If you’re using the CLAUDE.md + actions.md setup described in Turn Claude into your project manager with two files, you can keep a “Someday/Maybe” section directly in actions.md and surface it in the monthly review prompt. The context is already loaded; you’re routing the triage through a system that already knows your work. This is how the NP System integrates with the AI layer — the system defines the containers, Claude works within them.

How the Someday/Maybe List Connects to Your Wider System

The Someday/Maybe list works best when it’s genuinely integrated with the rest of your GTD setup rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

It connects directly to your context lists — when a Someday/Maybe item gets promoted, it immediately gets a context tag so you know when and where you can act on it. It connects to your natural planning model — when a promoted item becomes a real project, the planning model gives you the structure to break it down. And it connects to the weekly review, which is the heartbeat that keeps the whole system moving.

Miss any one of those connections and the Someday/Maybe list starts to feel optional. Build them in and the list becomes one of the more interesting parts of your system — a live record of where you’re heading, not just where you are.

The Someday/Maybe List in Practice

The Someday/Maybe list doesn’t reduce your ambition. It organises it.

Good ideas have a home. Active commitments stay clean. Your weekly review gets faster because you’re not re-triaging items you already decided weren’t right for now. The mental noise drops because you trust that nothing is slipping through — everything is either active, parked with a review date, or gone.

The failure mode is the same one that kills most productivity systems: skipping the review. A list you visit once a month dies slowly. A list you glance at every week stays alive, useful, and genuinely worth revisiting.

Build the review into your weekly session as a non-negotiable, even if it only takes ten minutes. That’s the whole practice.

If you want to build the full GTD-influenced system — from capture through Someday/Maybe to your weekly review — the NP System free course walks through the whole framework across eleven modules. No charge, and you can start today.