LIST FOR LIFE

The magical powers of a to-do list

What can a to-do list tell us about the person who wrote it? Plenty, if we recall that this is the most common means by which many of us break down our grand dreams into a collection of earthly tasks. Just forget yours in the pocket of a shirt that’s sent to the laundry, and you’ll realize how much to-do lists have become part of your identity.

Our to-do list is like a secular version of a personal prayer, our way of telling the world and ourselves what we want, and in which order. To-do lists have no narrative line. Organizing a sock drawer and writing a book of poems could appear one after the other on such a list. And as many list-makers know, the very act of committing the tasks to paper has a magical effect on the odds that they will actually get done—even if a long period of staring at them is sometimes a prerequisite for obtaining this magical effect. We’re all familiar with the guilt we feel after satisfying our curiosity by peeking into somebody else’s medicine cabinet, or at their lists of cell-phone contacts. Reading someone else’s to-do list has a similar effect. They illuminate the writer’s secret self, the difference between who the person really is and the more polished version he’s trying to present. Reading other people’s to-do lists is a type of low-budget voyeurism, like that of a reality show. We all wonder at times if we’re normal, and reading the lists of tasks facing others provides a calming response. We find that other people’s lives are also filled with challenges.

A to-do list is prepared in several stages. The preliminary one is full of hope and subtle emotions, and makes us confront the blank page face-to-face. At this point, even if the list is not yet fully formed, thinking about the tasks ahead fills us with a sense of purposefulness that begets pride. Then comes the pleasant stage of calling the topics to mind, and the mild euphoria that comes with the thought of all the vast possibilities still open to us.

And finally there’s the real thrill of satisfaction experienced by those who have gone as far as working out a strict timetable for completing all the tasks, most of which are unachievable to begin with. There’s no problem with this if one accepts the words of American artist Charles Green Shaw: “Real happiness consists in not what we actually accomplish, but what we think we accomplish.”

But let’s also admit it: crossing a task off the list after it is completed does have an exhilarating effect which verges on pure euphoria. Psychologists say that compulsive list-makers are trying to create a sense of control over their lives, which, were it not for the lists, would be seen as overly chaotic. Such people have an unconscious fear that their world will spin out of control if they do not keep making their lists. When you make a list, it’s easier to see which tasks are more important, and even one that entails a lot of work suddenly seems more doable when shrunken into a single line on a page. A survey conducted in the United States found that 42% of the population compose such lists. Still, the question remains: do they help us function better, or only encourage the bad habit of procrastination? Because people don’t put off doing a task just because of the absence of a list on which that task appears.

If you ever do stop to look up from your list-making, you will find that we are living in an entire world made up of lists: from human civilization’s greatest cultural assets—such as the Holy Scriptures—all the way down to mundane things like shopping lists or ideas for what to pack for a trip; restaurant menus; wills; Google search results; “Ten Best” lists or even the Ten Plagues in Egypt.

Eco’s lists

In 2009, Italian writer Umberto Eco (author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum) curated an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris that was made up entirely of lists. “The Infinity of Lists” constituted a journey through the worlds of art, literature and music, inspired by the magic that numbers exert upon Eco and, equally, upon exhaustive research conducted by the writer inside the world’s most famous museum.

In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly, Eco explained that culture was born out of the human need to make the infinite comprehensible. He says we use lists, catalogues, museum collections, dictionaries and encyclopedias to try to grasp that which is ungraspable. Behind every list, Eco says, lies the difficulty in finding the precise expression for something. If asked, he would probably say that recitation of the names of those who perished in the Holocaust is an attempt to anchor the inconceivable in the conceivable.

Eco says it was Homer who served as his inspiration for the entire exhibition. In The Iliad, when the ancient epic poet seeks to depict the daunting size of the Greek army, he first invokes the image of a forest fire, which he likens to the gleam of the fighters’ weapons. When this image does not convey the magnitude of the spectacle to Homer’s satisfaction, he transcends the limitations of descriptive expression by means of a long list of names of commanders, their background and the number of ships they are bringing to battle. The list is 350 lines long.

Lists represent high culture and advanced civilization inasmuch as they enable us to examine basic definitions that can be used in describing our world. Eco asserts that cultural history is full of lists: of saints, armies or medicinal plants, treasures or books. One section of the exhibition was playfully titled “Mille e Tre” (1,003), the number that concludes the list of women whom the legendary Don Juan aimed to seduce in Spain. Eco believes that our attraction to lists derives from the consciousness of the finiteness of our lives. This leads us to love that which we feel has no limit or end, and thus we distract ourselves from the inevitability of death. “We love lists because we don’t want to die,” he says.

The exhibition curated by Eco was not the only one on the subject. After this came a show in Washington (at the Smithsonian) that revealed, by means of the lists they kept, the compulsive, control-seeking side of some of the world’s most famous artists. Lists of ideas, instructions, ambitions, biographical details, paintings, tasks, colors. One list in Picasso’s handwriting proposed names for the 1913 Armory Show, the first international exhibition of modern art in the United States. The list shows that Picasso did not know how to correctly spell the name of one of the biggest artists of his time: Marcel Duchamp. Another list, from 1961, written by the great Finnish architect-designer Eero Saarinen, lays out the tasks for a major architectural project in Oslo. The week after he made the list, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died just days later—a bracing reminder that none of us will ever be able to accomplish all of the tasks on our lists.

The word that describes the compulsive urge to make lists is glazomania, and the Internet is the ultimate instrument for fulfilling this desire. There are more lists to be found there than one could ever read or use. The Internet is changing the way in which we consume information. Less words per page, more pictures—and, of course, more lists. On many list sites, you can also influence the rankings of the items in question.

Web wonders

Tools for creating and managing lists are available for free. One of these is listproducer.com, which aims to inspire the would-be list-maker, and help him become more efficient and organized. The site was launched in April 2011 by Paula Rizzo, an Emmy-winning Fox News producer, who says she owes her achievements to her compulsion for list-making. She is certain that making lists of pros and cons can decide the fate of any relationship.

Listography.com helps users create lists and share them with others, and it features an application that offers possible topics for lists. Lisa Nola, the site’s founder, says the idea came to her when she decided to post online lists that she wrote for her mother before her mother passed away from cancer. She said she published the personal lists out of a need to share her pain with others, and to be comforted by people who read the lists.

The advent of social networking sites has made us interested in the daily doings of people we know (or think we know)—as long as we feel that they are also interested in us. Listography and similar sites are borne along by the narcissism that has become the great engine of our century. It seems that our lives have no meaning unless others are aware of them, and so we are moved to post on Facebook random lists of the things that describe us.

The first bestseller list was published in 1895 in the American magazine The Bookman, and since then there has been no end to our thirst for lists: the 20 most important quotes by Ronald Reagan; the 15 weirdest coincidences; the ten most common excuses women use to avoid sex; the eight most expensive things I must buy sometime; the five most common reasons why relationships end; and three ways to observe the honeysucker.

A whole host of servers support the activity of sites that list the top 100, top 50 or just the top ten things that you absolutely must see, read or do before you leave this world—like swim with dolphins, grow a beard and keep it for a month, write a will (how logical), ride an animal larger than a horse, attend the Olympics, shake the hand of someone who truly changed the fate of a country, or photograph an animal from an endangered species (aside from the picture, which you can keep forever, this will also remind you of the fragility of life). Basically, these are all experiences that entail some sort of genuine physical effort, a foray into uncharted territories and encounters with unusual beings, which force us to grapple with our hidden fears. One particularly tempting idea is to “get yourself an enemy”—a crude way of suggesting that you display so much commitment to a specific subject that you end up antagonizing someone. But most surprising of all is actually the similarity of all the lists online. As if all of our dreams and desires were designed by the same factory.

On ranker.com you can find thousands of lists, the most popular featuring the names of people and movies. The site boasts 3,325 lists about celebrities, 136 lists about death (for example, the last words of famous people who committed suicide) and no less than 16 lists about vampires (for example, five reasons to give into a vampire’s wishes and become one, with the main advantage being eternal life; the main disadvantage being you have to give up junk food and take up drinking blood). In a world where the quantitative measurement of phenomena around us has become a key tool in defining them, we’ve become enslaved to lists that rank things; if it can’t be put in some sort of order, it doesn’t exist. But it seems that this ceaseless measuring of the world’s pulse lets a few important truths elude us. Or could it be that we’re so busy listing everything in a certain order because we don’t want to have to face up to these truths?

Noteworthy lists

Listsofnote.com offers lists made by famous figures like Edison, Hitchcock, Henry Miller and Mark Twain. One reveals director Stanley Kubrick’s ideas for possible movie titles: “Movie Titles in Search of a Script.” One of the titles listed there, “If the Fuhrer Only Knew,” comes from a common expression in 1930s Germany, which was apparently used whenever someone goofed or something went wrong. Twain’s list was meant to help a gentleman who wants to save the tenants of a burning house but is unsure in what order things must be done to save people, and who should be assisted first. The list includes 26 types of people and items of furniture, in order of importance. In the top spot are fiancées, followed by ladies toward whom the rescuer harbors a certain sentiment although he has yet to inform them of this. At the bottom of the list: fireman, furniture and the mother-in-law.

On the listsofnote.com website you can also find dozens of names proposed by Thomas Edison and others for the invention that came to be known as the phonograph, a device that can record sound and play it back. Among the suggestions: cosmophone, melodagraph and chronophone. The most-read list on the site is from 1933, and which formed part of a letter from the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald to his 11-year-old daughter Scottie. In it he lists things to worry about (courage, cleanliness, efficiency, horsemanship); things not to worry about (popular opinion, dolls, the past, the future, triumph, mosquitoes, parents, boys, disappointments and pleasures), and things to think about (what am I really aiming for in my life?).

In 1927, the Association of American Movie Producers and Distributors published a list of the 11 subjects that should absolutely be avoided in future films, childbirth scenes, disparagement of clergy, interracial sex. It also listed 25 subjects to be cautious about portraying, use of the flag, surgery and sympathy toward criminals. In July 1838, six months before he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, Charles Darwin made a list of the pros and cons of marriage. The pros won out and the couple remained married until Darwin’s death in 1882. Among the reasons to marry? To have children (“If it please God”); a constant companion; someone to look after the household; and to enjoy the charms of music and conversation despite the waste of time entailed in such. Darwin had trouble picturing himself spending his life alone, toiling away like a worker bee. Reasons to not marry included loss of freedom to go where one liked; having to forgo the conversation of clever men at clubs; the need to visit relatives; loss of time and less chance to read in the evenings; and expenses that would affect one’s ability to purchase books.

Poetry also took note of the role of lists, as reflected in an excerpt from a wonderful poem by Wisława Szymborska:

“A list”

I’ve made a list of questions
to which I no longer expect answers,
since it’s either too early for them,
or I won’t have time to understand.
The list of questions is long,
and takes up matters great and small,
but I don’t want to bore you,
and will just divulge a few.