Someday Maybe gives a good idea somewhere to live without letting it pretend it belongs on today’s list. These are ideas you may want later, just not enough to make them active now, which is different from trash, where the things you’ve decided against go.
Think about a labeled shelf in your office for “not now.” You don’t throw the thing away, but you also don’t leave it in the middle of your desk competing with payroll, client work, and today’s calls. You put it on the shelf and decide later whether it deserves attention.
How it shows up
In GTD, this matters because your brain treats unmade decisions like loose commitments. “We should maybe do a podcast.” “We should maybe build that dashboard.” Left loose, they create noise; made into projects, your system becomes impossible. Someday Maybe is the third option: capture it, park it, review it later. It’s different from the inbox, which is the front door where unprocessed stuff lands before you decide what it is. Someday Maybe comes after the decision, once you’ve determined this isn’t a next action or an active project. It also connects to project phases: an idea wrong for phase one might be perfect for phase three.
Why you care
AI makes new ideas cheap. You can generate twenty improvements in a minute, but that doesn’t mean twenty projects. The cheaper ideas get, the more you need a place to hold them without obeying them. For client work, Someday Maybe protects focus: it lets you say this is interesting but not the constraint right now. A captured idea shouldn’t automatically become a promise.