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. In GTD, the shelf comes after the decision: you’ve determined this is neither a next action nor an active project. The inbox is different, the front door where unprocessed stuff lands.
Picture a shelf in your office labeled “not now.” You don’t throw the thing away, but you 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.
Why you care
Your brain treats unmade decisions like loose commitments. Left loose, they create noise; turned into projects, they make your system impossible. Someday Maybe is the third option: capture it, park it, review it later. AI makes new ideas cheap, and you can generate twenty improvements in a minute without owing anyone twenty projects. The cheaper ideas get, the more you need a place to hold them without obeying them. A captured idea shouldn’t automatically become a promise.