Part Five: The Bigger Picture · Chapter 16

Someday

Not everything that occurs to you needs to happen now. Some ideas are real — worth holding — but the timing isn't right. Someday is where those things go. It's not a graveyard and it's not a commitment. It's a holding area for genuine intentions that don't belong in your active task pool.

What Someday is for

When you're processing your inbox and something doesn't fit neatly into "task I should do this month" or "trash this," there's a third option: Park it. That sends the item to Someday — acknowledged as real, but not active. It won't appear in the Launchpad. It won't affect your fit score. It won't generate notifications. It's just waiting.

Someday exists because the alternative — throwing things away that might actually matter someday — creates a different kind of anxiety. The inbox is for capturing. Someday is for preserving without committing.

The kinds of things that belong in Someday:

A trip you want to take when the immigration process is done. A home improvement project you'll tackle after the Airbnb renovation is finished. A book you want to write after this one is done. A business idea that keeps coming back. A skill you genuinely want to develop when you have more bandwidth. These are real. They're just not now.

What doesn't belong in Someday: things you're quietly hoping will go away. Those belong in the trash. Someday is not for avoidance — it's for genuine deferral. The monthly review is where you face that distinction honestly.


The monthly review

Once a month, ATEND sends a gentle prompt: "You have 14 items in Someday. Want to spend 10 minutes reviewing them?" This is the only regular contact with the list. No other notifications. No passive guilt. Just a monthly check-in when you're ready.

The review mode shows one item at a time. For each, three options:

Keep Parked
Still real, still not yet
The idea or commitment is genuine but the timing still isn't right. It stays in Someday unchanged. You'll see it again next month.
Make Active
The time is right
Moves the item into your active pool. The full task or project setup flow runs — you assign a hat, energy, time estimate, and all the other fields. It enters your Launchpad and begins scoring normally.
Delete
This was never going to happen
Honest deletion. The system frames it positively: "Good call — that clears mental space." Not every captured idea deserves to live forever. Letting go of things that weren't real creates room for the things that are.

No guilt language, ever. The Someday review is designed to be a clean, low-pressure process. You're not confronting failures — you're doing maintenance. Each item gets one honest question: is this still real, and is now the time? Two yes answers means Make Active. One no means Keep Parked. Two no answers means Delete.


How items get into Someday

Three paths lead to Someday:

Park it — choosing the Park it option during inbox processing sends the item directly to Someday with no additional setup. It's the fastest path for things you want to acknowledge without deciding on right now.

Deferred from active — any active task or project can be sent to Someday from its detail view via "Park to Someday." This is useful when something that was once timely has become premature. The context notes and all fields are preserved.

Weekly Architecture Session — during the project review screen, you can park any active project to Someday in one tap. Projects whose horizon has become indefinite belong here, not cluttering the active project list.

Someday 14 items
Monthly review
10 minutes · 14 items waiting
Review
{[ { hat:"Book", color:"#E8960C", title:"Write a short story collection after the novel", days:47 }, { hat:"Ranch", color:"#4E8F1C", title:"Install solar panels — research tax credits first", days:23 }, { hat:"Airbnb", color:"#1A9882", title:"Add a second unit when permit allows", days:91 }, { hat:"Personal", color:"#888780", title:"Take a long trip to Portugal", days:38 }, ].map((item,i) => null)}
Write a short story collection after the novel
Book · 47 days
Install solar panels — research tax credits first
Ranch · 23 days
Add a second Airbnb unit when permit allows
Airbnb · 91 days
Take a long trip to Portugal
Personal · 38 days
+ 10 more
FIG. 16.1 The Someday list. Items show their hat color, title, and how long they've been parked. The teal "Monthly review" banner appears when the monthly prompt is active. Tapping Review enters the one-at-a-time review mode.

What Someday is not

Someday is not a second inbox. Items in Someday have already been processed — they've been acknowledged, categorized, and deliberately set aside. You're not deferring the decision; you've already made it. The decision is: real, but not now.

Someday is not a place to avoid the trash. The monthly review exists precisely to force honest reckoning with things that were never going to happen. A Someday list full of aspirations you're no longer actually interested in creates its own cognitive weight — a pile of unkept promises to a past version of yourself. Deleting those clears the space for things that are genuinely real.

Someday is not a project backlog. If something has a rough timeline, even a loose one, it should have a horizon setting (This Quarter, This Year) as a project — not sit in Someday. Someday is for things with no current timeline at all.

On the accumulation problem

If your Someday list is growing faster than you're reviewing it, that's a signal — either you're parking things too readily at processing time, or the monthly review isn't happening consistently enough. Neither is a character flaw. But a Someday list of 80 items starts to feel like a second inbox, and the monthly review stops feeling manageable. Keep it honest and keep it small. Twenty to thirty items is a healthy Someday list. Eighty is avoidance.