The Someday List Date
For Every "We Should Do That Sometime" You Never Wrote Down

It usually happens in the car. A billboard for a town two hours north, or a friend's photo from a trip, and one of you says it: we should do that sometime.

Then the light turns green.

Nobody writes it down, so there's no date on it and no place to put it, and the idea goes wherever the last dozen went.

Someday Is Not A Day On Any Calendar

Someday sounds like a time. It isn't one. Nothing gets booked on it. Nobody has ever had to leave the house because someday finally arrived.

In Someday Is Today, Matthew Dicks says someday might be his least favorite word in the English language: "Someday causes people to live small lives filled with wishes and dreams and delay and inaction."

That's heavy language for a couple who just want to see the sea lions at some point. The mechanism is the same at any size, though. An idea you two say in the car and never write down has no owner and no date. It doesn't get dropped on purpose. There's just nowhere for it to live.

So give it somewhere. One list, made on purpose, in one sitting, with a date on the top item before either of you goes to bed.

Plenty of what ends up on these lists is already sitting in your living room. If dancing together is one of the entries, that's what Date Nights Dancing is: easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you working on the same moves from the first video on. No studio. No dance experience required.

Run The Someday List In Twenty Minutes Tonight

I ran a version of this in the Spark in July, the Summer Someday List, a timed list game for summer date ideas. Nothing about it needs summer.

Two pens, two pieces of paper, one timer, and the two of you at the kitchen table.

1. Set the timer for six minutes and write separately. Anything either of you has ever said you should do sometime goes down. A restaurant, a state, a concert, a class, a hobby, the guest room you both want finished. No editing while the timer runs, and no reading each other's page yet.

2. Read both lists to each other, no vetoing. You'll want to explain why one of hers is impractical. That can wait. For six more minutes the only job is that each of you hears all of it.

3. Star anything you both wrote down. Overlap is the cheapest thing on the table tonight. If you both put down the same beach town, that one's settled.

4. Rank three of them by how soon they could happen, not by how badly you want them. Portugal can sit at the top of the wish list and at the bottom of this one. You're sorting for what could carry a real date inside six months. In Someday Is Today, Matthew Dicks argues for a six-month plan over a five-year one, because a five-year plan lets a person do nothing for a long time.

5. Open the calendar and put a real date on number one. Not a month. A date, with both your names on it, before either of you gets up from the table. If it needs a sitter, tonight is also when you text the sitter.

That's it. Twenty minutes, and a pile that's been sitting there for years is one page and one appointment.

In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe people who look back at a turning point and call it luck, when what happened was a decision: "They were not receiving a moment, they were seizing it." A calendar entry is the small, unglamorous version of that.

Four Spark Ideas That Keep The List From Stalling

Building the list is the easy night. Keeping it alive past week three is the harder part. Four things from the Spark archive that help:

1. Gold And Silver Dates

One Spark framework, Gold and Silver Dates, exists to settle one question up front: what counts as a date at all. Put that question to your list and split it in two. Some items need an evening, a sitter, and money. Others need an hour and nobody's permission. If every line on your page is the first kind, you might get to one of them this quarter. Write eight of the second kind underneath.

2. New Or Rerun?

This one ran in the Spark at the end of July. List everything you two did together last month, then mark each one new or rerun. Yours will probably come back nearly all reruns. That's what a full week does to a couple. Then pick one new thing to do next, and let your someday list be the supply. A new thing is easier to say yes to when it doesn't need a reservation: Date Nights Dancing runs in your own living room, fifteen minutes at a time.

3. The Last Cone Of Summer

An August Spark date idea: go get ice cream, but text each other a sealed guess at the other's order first, loser pays, and eat them on a bench instead of in the car. The part your list needs is the window that idea ran on, the end of warm nights. Give at least one item a real expiration and only a real one. The outdoor concert series ends in September. Her sister is in town through the 20th. The lake is warm for another month.

4. The Driveway Conversation

The best place to run this whole thing, if your house is full of kids, is a Spark mini-date from a while back: when you two pull in, stay in the car with the engine off and talk for ten minutes before going inside. Nobody in a parked car needs anything from either of you, which is more than you can say for the kitchen table on a Tuesday.

If you'd rather work from ideas somebody else already wrote down, the date night ideas hub is full of them, and any of those can go straight onto the list.

Keep The List Where You Both Can See It

Paper is fine for tonight. It's useless by month four, because it ends up in a drawer under the takeout menus. Move it somewhere shared before you go to bed: a note on both your phones, a page on the fridge, the back page of the family calendar.

Then keep adding. One of you will say we should do that sometime again soon, and when that happens it goes on the list within the hour. That habit is the same one underneath a resolution the two of you keep past January: it survives on the appointment.

Some seasons put the list under real pressure. If you two are heading into retirement, you're about to have more unassigned time than the list has entries. And if the ideas mostly stopped coming in the first place, the shortage sits upstream of the list. That one is about why the ideas stopped rather than what to do with them once you have them.

This can read as one more system to maintain. It isn't one. Twenty minutes with a pen, and one line with a date on it.

The two of you still say we should do that sometime. Wanting things together is the part no list can manufacture, and you already have that. The list just gives it a date.