The Someday/Maybe List

In the AI Story

The Someday/Maybe list performed a subtle and important psychological function that practitioners often underestimated. It was not merely a parking lot for ideas. It was a trust mechanism: the mind could release an idea because the list promised to hold it, and the weekly review promised to revisit it. The release was possible because the distance between Someday/Maybe and Active was meaningfully large — an item on the list could not be executed without a deliberate decision to promote it to an active project, and that promotion would cost real resources.

In the pre-AI world, the economic distance between Someday/Maybe and Active was enforced by execution cost. A book idea on the list would require months of writing to realize; a speculative business would require years of investment. These costs made deferral real and release psychologically stable. The mind could look at the list without anxiety because the items on it were genuinely latent — they could not be actualized on a whim.

AI collapses this distance dramatically. An idea for a software tool that would formerly have required weeks of engineering can now be prototyped in an afternoon. A business hypothesis that would have needed a team and a budget can be tested in a weekend. The Someday/Maybe list, previously stable because its items were genuinely remote, becomes a menu of immediately available temptations. Every item accuses the practitioner of not acting when action is now cheap. The list's anxiolytic function inverts; it becomes a source of anxiety rather than a release from it.

Origin

Allen developed the Someday/Maybe list as a companion to the active project list, observing that practitioners needed a legitimate place to hold ideas that were not currently actionable but that they did not want to discard. The list was formalized in Getting Things Done (2001) as one of the standard containers in the GTD organizational system.

The concept has analogues in older knowledge-management practices — the commonplace book's sections for ideas to be returned to, the researcher's file of unpursued hypotheses. Allen's contribution was operationalizing the pattern within a complete productivity system and specifying its role in the weekly review cycle.

Key Ideas

The list was a release mechanism. Its deeper function was not storage but permission — allowing the mind to let go of an idea by trusting the system to hold it.

Economic distance enabled release. Items on the list were safely deferred because acting on them required substantial future investment, making release psychologically stable.

AI inverts the psychology. When list items become immediately executable, the distance that made deferral sustainable collapses, and the list becomes a source of accusation rather than relief.

Renunciation replaces deferral. In the AI age, the list works only if practitioners make stronger commitments — not merely deferring ideas but deliberately renouncing them against the criteria of the upper horizons of focus.