Today & Someday
Two concepts that define the boundaries of active work: what you're doing now, and what you're not.
Today
Today is the set of Actions you will touch today. It's populated during your Daily Review each morning. When it's empty, your day is done.
How Today is filled
Actions arrive in Today in two ways:
Automatic: From each active Flow, the first uncompleted Action surfaces automatically. If you have five active Flows, five Actions arrive in Today — one per Flow — without any effort from you. This is the default.
Manual: You can pull additional Actions into Today if you want to work ahead, override the default sequence, or address something that needs to happen today regardless of its position in a Flow.
The combination gives you both automatic momentum (the system keeps surfacing work) and deliberate control (you decide what else to bring in).
Everything in Today is checkable today
This is the defining property of Today, and it's why the constraint matters.
Every item in Today can be completed today:
- Do — checked when you finish the work
- Delegate — checked when you send the instruction
- Review — checked when you approve (or re-delegate)
Await items don't appear in Today — they're tracked separately, because there's nothing to do until something arrives.
If an item in Today can't be checked today, it shouldn't be in Today. Either it's waiting on something else (make it Await), or it's too large to complete in a day (break it into smaller Actions), or it's not actually ready to work on yet (give it a future date).
Today vs. calendar
Both exist. Don't mix them.
Calendar — time-bound commitments with a specific time: meetings, appointments, calls, deadlines. They happen when they happen. You can't move them freely.
Today — flexible Actions you've chosen to work on today. No specific time. You do them when you have capacity.
The distinction matters because mixing them creates false constraints. If "prepare presentation" is in your calendar as an all-day event, it collides with your actual commitments and creates friction. If it's in Today as an Action, you fit it around your meetings when you have focus time.
Your calendar tells you when you're unavailable. Today tells you what you're working on.
When Today is empty
This is the completion signal for the day. Not "it's 6pm" or "I'm tired." Today is empty.
This signal works because Today is a closed set — you built it this morning and committed to finishing it. That's different from a task list, which is always open-ended. A task list never empties; you can always add more. Today empties, because it was never meant to hold everything — only what you chose for today.
This signal is honest because every item in Today was completable. An empty Today means real things got done — not that time passed. You chose these Actions in the morning. They're gone by noon, or 3pm, or end of day. Either way: done.
If Today is regularly not empty at end of day, that's feedback. Either you're overloading it (pull fewer Actions), the Actions are too large (break them down), or something in your Flows is stuck (check during Weekly Review).
Today capacity
Flow surfacing is a natural capacity limiter. Each active Flow contributes one Action. If you have six active Flows, six Actions arrive automatically. For most people on most days, that's enough.
The overloading problem almost always starts in the manual step — pulling extra Actions in because they "might fit" or because you feel you should be doing more. Before adding anything manually, ask: can I realistically complete everything already in Today? If the answer is uncertain, don't add more.
A realistic Today is one where you genuinely expect to finish. An optimistic Today is one where you hope to finish. Optimistic Todays produce undone items. Undone items produce pressure. Pressure produces avoidance.
The goal isn't to do as much as possible in a day. The goal is to design a day you can actually finish.
Undone Actions: no backlog
OTD has no "overdue" list.
When an Action isn't completed today, it doesn't enter a backlog or accumulate guilt. It stays at the front of its Flow. Tomorrow morning, Daily Review surfaces it again — as one Action among the day's new set, not as a pile of yesterday's failures.
This is a structural property of OTD. Because Actions live in Flows rather than a flat list, they can't pile up. The list doesn't grow. Tomorrow always starts fresh.
The practical consequence: an undone Action is not a problem to manage. It's work that will surface again when you're ready for it.
What this requires from you: don't treat undone Actions as carry-over debt. Don't mentally add them on top of tomorrow's load before the day starts. Tomorrow's Daily Review will surface them as part of a new, deliberate Today. Design that Today as if it were the first day — because structurally, it is.
Someday
Someday is where you park things you're not working on now but might in the future.
What lives in Someday:
- A dormant Project — a goal you're interested in but not pursuing yet
- A dormant Flow — a stream of work you've paused
- A standalone Action — something you want to do eventually but not now
Someday is equivalent to GTD's Someday/Maybe list. The concept is identical. The implementation in OTD extends to Projects and Flows, not just standalone items.
Moving to Someday
When you decide you're not working on something now:
- Move the Project, Flow, or Action to Someday
- It stops surfacing Actions in Today
- It disappears from active view
- It appears in your Weekly Review's Someday list
This is not deletion. You're not giving up on it. You're acknowledging: not now.
The value of Someday over deletion is that good ideas don't disappear. A Project that isn't timely now might become critical in three months. A skill you want to develop might have to wait until you finish a current commitment. Someday holds all of it, quietly, until Weekly Review brings it back up.
Someday and Weekly Review
Every Someday item gets reviewed once a week. The questions are simple:
Is this ready to activate? If something you've been deferring is now timely — circumstances changed, you finished a commitment, the opportunity arrived — pull it back to active.
Is this something I'll never do? Some Someday items age out. The idea that seemed compelling six months ago is no longer interesting. Delete it. A Someday list bloated with things you'll never actually do becomes noise.
Someday should feel like a waiting room, not a graveyard. Things enter it with the intention of coming back. If that intention is gone, so should the item.
Reference vs. Someday
These are different.
Someday — things you might act on. There's a future Action attached to them.
Reference — non-actionable information you want to keep. Notes, documents, links. No action required, now or later.
If you find yourself filing something as Someday but it never turns into an Action, it might actually be Reference. If it's information you want to keep but don't need to act on, move it there.