[Cameron]

I like to distinguish between "On Hold" and "Someday/Maybe" in this way:

One key point that has really helped me with my GTD lists is simply to put more projects on hold. I only set projects I conceivably see myself working on the in the next week or so to "Active".

Any project where I have made at least some form of commitment to myself to complete, and that I know I will be working on soon (but not in the next week or so), is placed On Hold.

For other tasks and projects that Im just not sure about yet, I put them in a "Someday" Single Action List with its status set to On Hold. (I use a single action list because many of these ideas are single actions and have not been fully formed into projects yet).

This keeps clutter down when reviewing because otherwise I'd have far too many "On Hold" projects and actions cluttering up my view when Im trying to decide what Im going to mark as Active this week.

[achamess]

Originally Posted by Cameron

I like to distinguish between "On Hold" and "Someday/Maybe" in this way:

One key point that has really helped me with my GTD lists is simply to put more projects on hold. I only set projects I conceivably see myself working on the in the next week or so to "Active".

Any project where I have made at least some form of commitment to myself to complete, and that I know I will be working on soon (but not in the next week or so), is placed On Hold.

For other tasks and projects that Im just not sure about yet, I put them in a "Someday" Single Action List with its status set to On Hold. (I use a single action list because many of these ideas are single actions and have not been fully formed into projects yet).

This keeps clutter down when reviewing because otherwise I'd have far too many "On Hold" projects and actions cluttering up my view when Im trying to decide what Im going to mark as Active this week.

Great response. I've begun using OF like this since my original post. The utility of OF is to only show you those things that you can/should be working on at the moment (within a week, or until your next review, whichever comes first). Like you, I put near-term projects in OF but set them on hold so I don't see any of their actions. That helps me not become overwhelmed.

I like your distinction between the someday/maybe and on hold. Someday/maybe are things you want to do but are not fully defined projects that are in the queue in the near/medium term.

Thanks for the clarification. This really helps.

[brentajones]

Here's a way I'm using Someday/Maybe that wasn't immediately apparent until I'd been using OF for a while. It may be incredibly obvious to everyone else, but I thought it was kind of cool.

I have a Someday/Maybe single action list, as a couple people have stated. However, I don't want to lose the thinking that's gone into any project planning or next actions (especially if there are multiple parallel next actions) on projects that I decide should be put off for now.

The discovery for me was that you can drag entire projects between the sidebar and an action list. Example:

Let's say I create a project and plan it out, involving several different (parallel) next actions, and nested sequential actions underneath and such. Now I decide I'm not going to be able to accomplish that now, so it should be Someday/Maybe. You could put it on hold, yes, and that works just fine.

But another option is to just grab the entire project from the sidebar (like you're rearranging the order) and drop it right on top of the Someday/Maybe list. You'll wind up with a nested action group in the Someday/Maybe list, with the project's name as the top-level action and any other actions nested underneath.

Then, when you're reviewing your Someday/Maybe list and you decide it's time to work on a project, you can just select that nested action group and drag it out from the list into the sidebar, and it reappears exactly as it was created in the first place.

I'm not sure if you lose any meta-info from the project, but I haven't noticed any missing.

Again, this may be something "everyone knows", but it was new to me so I thought I'd share.