Some Thoughts About Making Lists
They can reveal a lot about us — especially if you save them. Plus a new raffle and a new Inconspicuous News Roundup!
As a society, or maybe as a species, we love lists. We have checklists, bucket lists, and wish lists. Ten-best lists and all-time-worst lists. Lists of things to buy, things to get rid of, places to visit, places we’ve been. Numbered lists, alphabetical lists, chronological lists, bulleted lists. Even Santa Claus famously makes a list! If you go to Amazon and search on “books about lists,” you get over 30,000 results — an epic list of lists.
If you were making a list of people who make a lot of lists, you would probably include me. When I go to the supermarket, I have a shopping list. When I’m preparing to travel, I have a packing list. I also keep lists of movies I want to see, museum and gallery shows I want to check out, restaurants and bars I want to try, people I want to invite to my next party or gathering, article ideas for Inconspicuous Consumption, and a lot more.
I used to have even more lists: all the Mets games I’d attended (and whether they won), all the bands I’d seen, all the out-of-print records I was searching for, along with rankings of my favorite movies, bands, foods, Star Trek episodes, and probably several other things I’m forgetting. At one point I also kept a list everyone I’d had sex with — not something I’m particularly proud of, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s kept that kind of list.
I grew up in the analog era, so I wrote out most of these lists in notebooks or on legal pads. Nowadays, I keep most of my lists as files on my computer or my phone. In addition, digital culture has created its own forms of list-making. Some of these are literal lists (an eBay watchlist, a Spotify playlist, a Netflix queue), while others are more de facto. My email in-box, for example, is essentially a list of communiqués I need to respond to or act upon, and my open browser tabs form a composite list of websites I’ve been meaning to check out and articles I’m planning to read.
But there’s one kind of list that I still write out by hand. That would be the all-important to-do list — the nagging inventory of tasks and chores I need to address. I’ve kept my to-do lists in the analog realm because physically crossing out a to-do list item after it’s been completed is one of life’s great pleasures. If my to-do list is reaching such an imposing length that it’s stressing me out, I’ll sometimes make it even longer by adding a few routine tasks that I’m about to do anyway, like “Eat breakfast” or “Brush teeth,” just so I can cross those items off the list right away and feel like I’m making some progress.
That brings up a key list-keeping variable: how to mark a completed item. I know some people like to draw a single line, like this. Others employ the checklist method, which entails drawing a little box next to each list item and then either filling in the box or marking it with a check mark or an “X.” But I prefer to use swirly lines to completely obliterate the line item:
