Best Someday/Maybe practices & Perspective Formulas
 

I spent some time with OF last summer and just couldn't get my brain around some of the perspectives. So, I went back to Things.

I'm trying to use OF again, as my tasks are getting a bit more complicated.

I'm wrestling with Someday/Maybe. I love having a place to do a mind dump and come back to later.

Choices:

1) Create a Someday/Maybe folder in the left sidebar as its own area of my life. Under that either just dump all on-hold projects there, and dump all single action items in one single-action list.

2) Keep a folder called Someday under each folder (so I'd have a Someday folder under the Finance folder, along with a single-action item renamed to Someday to catch the one-offs).

Anyone got a better idea?

And while we're at it. what are the formulas for your Someday/Maybe Perspective?

I use a Context called Someday. I have Single Action Projects called "Aspire - NAME" (where NAME is the name of the Area) in most of my top-level Folders. Those Projects hold just the "chores" that arise randomly for the given area. I had oscillated between having one main FOLDER OF CHORES for everything random+single action and having Folders in each area. I settled on the latter because, with the former, I lost oversight of what belonged where during my selected review of individual areas (Folders).

As for mind dumping, have you thought to create Single Action Project called "Mind Dumps" in a "general purpose" Folder? Use that Project to dump your thoughts without constraints to defining anything about them. Set the review cycle for some reasonable periodic cycle (once weekly or so) to re-cast those individual mind dumps to their rightful places.

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JJW

I keep a "Someday/Maybe" Single Action List within each Area of Responsibility (which I maintain as folders containing multiple projects or single action lists). I keep separate S/M lists because I want my "Photography" actions kept separate from my "Health" or "Friends&Family" actions -- it's just easier for me to keep things straight that way.

Each S/M single action list is set to a status of "On Hold" so the actions do not show up in my day-to-day context views and perspectives.

S/M as a Context
 

I use Someday/Maybe as a Context as well.

It provides flexibility to review items from two points of view - Contexts mode during a (GTD) Weekly Review where I'm asking myself if I want to make any of them actionable or vice versa.

In Projects mode I can see items grouped together by common topics or themes (in my case GTD Areas of Focus). I find this view often sparks ideas or thoughts to capture.

As you can guess I'm using OmniFocus to implement a by the book GTD system.