Good topic, and I have to admit that I go back and forth on this one — although I’m firmly in one camp right now.

In the past (in both Kinkless and OmniFocus), I’ve used “someday maybe” as a context. Fortunately, if you decide to do this, OF will let you create inactive (what I think of as “inert”) contexts — you can choose to have a given context or context group not generate next actions into your other lists. These contexts then show up only when viewing “All Contexts” (vs. just “Active Contexts”). And I think a system similar to this can work pretty well. But…

Personally? I’m currently not keeping someday/maybe items anyplace near active task lists for a Talmudic GTD reason: they’re not part of a project I’ve agreed (with myself) to undertake and complete, so they don’t get to live anywhere near real actions. Does that make any sense?

I keep someday/maybes in a text file that I review weekly, since it’s become really important to me that I trust my task area will reflect open loops that I can and should do something about (the only slight exception is “waiting on” items which are also inactive contexts — but they reflect stuff I will need to do something about once an external condition changes).

As far as whether you’re deferring too much? I dunno. I think that’s the whole reason for your SMN list — you know your idea is safe and sound someplace so you never sweat the possibility of losing it. Plus you’re reviewing it weekly and can always escalate if the spirit moves you.

I think either can work great for you — just depends on your mental model and how you like to ensure that active and inactive (or non-existent) stuff won’t get mixed up (but also won’t get lost).

Right. I was a bit shocked when, after having experimented with ‘Inactive’ topics, I went to restore from a backup in a very early alpha of OF and found that it hadn’t been backing up the Inactive objects. Naturally I bugfiled it, and I should check that it no longer does that. Inactive may be the way to go.

I’m leery of running a separate SMN list because of the dogma of having only one system (sure, you can argue that OF/kGTD plus separate SMN file constitutes a single system, but you’re adding complexity and more ‘moving parts’ to what should be a rock-solid reliable system for you, and the riskiest part of the system is you yourself and your diligence at executing the review activities).

I have always thought of Someday/Maybe as a context. I think this stems from first implementing GTD with my Treo 600. S/M was just another category. After that I decided to keep it as an unordered list in Backpack, where I kept all of my GTD stuff. At that phase (I’m talking over the course of a few years here) I started to see S/M more as part of the nether-parts, akin to Vertical Planning. It’s a list that I’ll try to review every few months.

I would like to think about adding it to OF (currently trying it out, haven’t bought into it yet) but it seems like so much more work to add each item and go through those steps to make it inactive when I compare it to my simple page o’ stuff I have now.

I like the idea of having a list of SomedayMaybe projects in a separate text file (mine would be in my Yojimbo Weekly Review folder).

However, I would worry about the fact that it would take a couple extra steps to take a newly someday maybe project out of OF and put it into the list. Especially if I had done some next action planning. The idea of retyping that text up to two times is unappealing.

I see Merlin’s point about keeping SomedayMaybe projects away from the working projects and actions, and the single SomedayMaybe list is very appealing. I might give it a shot.

But as with all things GTD, I am wary of changes that add steps to an otherwise drag-free system.