Why we’re all so obsessed with making lists
Guess what, people — lists are cool. Yes, lists — once the preserve of confused individuals in the frozen peas aisle, and solitary obsessives with bedroom tans — are having a moment.
And not the kind of moment with which we have traditionally associated them — the dreaded to-do list — but a brand new incarnation that reflects our post-digital goldfish attention span coupled with our burgeoning narcissism.
Can’t concentrate on a whole page? Never mind, read a list instead. Better still, write one to upload — no topic too trivial, no subject too inane.
Girls actress Lena Dunham posted a list of what she ate for two days.
She did this on an app called Li.st, which was launched in late 2015 by BJ Novak from US version of The Office and co-nerd Dev Flaherty, and is proving popular both with celebrities and non-entities alike. Think Trip Advisor for micro-trivia — top ten couples in Game of Thrones, that kind of thing.
But first, a recap on traditional lists. Do you make them? Of course you do. Thanks to the glorification of busy, we are all so overwhelmed by daily life that we need to write ourselves bullet-point directives to get through it.
The more successful we are (where we define successful as being cash rich rather than time rich), the more essential the list-making — Richard Branson says he lives his life by lists, and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg carries an old school, non-digital pen and notebook everywhere.
The UK stationary chain Paperchase has a whole section of decorative notebooks dedicated to list making.
For those of us who are not heads of global corporations, lists used to be mostly for the supermarket. Bananas, tea bags, loo roll, cat food. Utilitarian, scrawled on a scrap of paper in blue biro.
But as we get busier, and our lives more filled up with day-to-day tasks, the to-do list has become a daily blueprint.
My sister, a busy academic with a small child, has always made lists, and I have always mocked her for her Virgoan excesses.
“I have no list shame,” she says. “I feel sorry for people who don’t make lists. Their lives must be chaos.” (She means me by the way. I am list averse and disorganised.)
This is because the traditional to-do list is full of pressure and implied failure — phone plumber/file tax returns/deworm the dog.
These kinds of lists contain items we have to write down because they are too boring, tedious or unpleasant for our brains to remember automatically. Yet if we do not write them down, the result is blocked drains, the tax man in pursuit, and a wormy dog.
Have you noticed how we never forget the fun stuff? The exciting stuff? That’s why we have to-do lists. Our brains discard the dull minutiae — and who can blame them.
Dedicated list makers like my sister, on the other hand,
say that by making lists, it gives them peace of mind, clarity at what needs to be done, and a sense of achievement when each task gets completed and ticked off. She says she sleeps better if she writes her to-do list the night before — that it gives a sense of organisation in an information-overloaded, demanding world.
This idea of lists as a self-management tool is supported by a plethora of psychotherapists, including Bruno Koeltz, who advises his clients to make doable to-do lists. Koeltz suggests three categories — urgent, non-urgent and only-if-there’s-nothing-else-left-to do (or “never”, as I would call it) — so that we avoid the self-sabotage of perfectionism and failure to achieve.
But lists are not all about tasks. Since the advent of sites like Buzzfeed, compilation lists are the new book chapters for our gnatlike attention spans. Ten funniest hamsters. Beyonce’s best hairdos. Forty million ways to eat an avocado.
Of course these lists have always existed within the male arena — think Q magazine, the blokey music monthly that has been publishing lists like Ten Best Oasis B-Sides for decades now. In fiction, the protagonist in High Fidelity is a classic example of male compilation list mania.
But what of these new lists?
Turns out compilation lists are not that new at all. The first recognisably modern one was published by the New York Times in 1892. It was simply called The 400, and was drawn up by a prototype PR person called Ward McAllister, under the subheadings of ‘Nobs’ and ‘Swells’. ‘Nobs’ were old Wasp money, and ‘Swells’ were the nouveau riche of whom McAllister was a member, having hiked his bank balance and social status by marrying a ‘Nob’.
The list was called The 400 because that was the maximum number of people who could fit into the ballroom of society hostess Mrs John Jacob Astor.
Today, lists can be about anything; they are a form of self-expression for people who can’t be bothered to write whole paragraphs.
On the Li.st app (“not for groceries”) are compilations from the quasi-inspirational — “6 TED quotes to make you feel like less of a mess", "Iconic Golden Girls quotes that are still relevant” to the downright preposterous — “The thoughts of a 7/11 employee trying to explain Free Slurpee Day to a robber”.
All you need to upload the inside of your brain are bullet points and a smart phone.
If you do like lists — and apparently there are quite a few of you out there — then rather than hurting your head reading the mind-dross of nobodies, you could instead look at Lists Of Note, compiled by Shaun Usher, who previously gave us Letters of Note.
He includes a shopping list written by two 9th century Tibetan monks, the 57 sins already committed by a 19-year-old Isaac Newton, Galileo’s list of things needed to make a telescope, and a list of Marilyn Monroe’s New Year’s resolutions.
From advice to ‘chick rockers’ listed by Chrissie Hynde to Sylvia Plath’s self admonishing “Do exercises!”, reading the lists of others gives us a pared-down glimpse into their psyches. “Marry/not marry,” pondered Charles Darwin.
Sometimes, as was the case with Albert Einstein’s outrageously misogynist list of orders to his wife Mileva Maric, issued in 1914 (they divorced five years later) and reproduced in Walter Isaacson’s book Einstein: His Life and Universe, this insight proves more revelatory than we would like — he may not quite have been the affable genius of popular conception.
Here’s a taster:
“You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego [sic]:
“My sitting at home with you
My going out or travelling with you.
You will obey the following points in your relations with me:
You will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way
You will stop talking to me if I request it
You will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behaviour.”
Far more fun is a tongue in cheek to-do list from Shaun Usher’s compilation, drawn up by Johnny Cash, brief and to the point:
Not smoke
Kiss June
Not kiss anyone else
Cough
Pee
Eat
Not eat too much
Worry
Go see Mama
Practice piano
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am off to waste another chunk of my life watching the Top Ten Cats Falling Off Things on a list site that will clog up my hard drive with viruses.
Because after all, it’s the simple pleasures that make life worthwhile.
