List-o-mania

I do not remember a time in my life when I wasn’t a fan of lists. As a child I listed everything from my favourite S Club 7 and Spice Girls hits, career aspirations, and possible names for future pets. Lists are joy. They log ideas, tasks, and feelings, give us a sense of what is important, and motivate us to action. They give structure to everything, and without becoming completely consumed by them, they can make life so much easier and more enjoyable.

Before we get to the art of list-writing, let me take you down my own path of personal experience with lists. I cannot remember exactly when I started using to-do lists on a regular basis but I think it may have been later secondary school. There was so much work to keep track of, especially in the Leaving Cert, that to try and manage it without some sort of to-do list seemed impossible to me. These lists were sporadic in nature, penned during a spare few minutes before class, and usually contained no more than 7 items. Each item was something I planned to study, finish, or read back over that day, for example. The rush of excitement that came from ticking these things off was like nothing else, and a decade later the mere action of marking items as complete still hasn’t lost its potency.

Outside of to-do lists, I also find writing a to-pack list when going on holidays to be highly beneficial. There is nothing worse than being halfway to your destination and realising with dread that you have left behind an essential item which you will have to forgo for the remainder of the trip, or fork out the cash for at the airport. Not to toot the proverbial horn, but I fail to recall the last time I accidentally left something behind when going on holidays, and the secret is simply to write a to-pack list, ideally in the few days leading up to leaving. 

Not all lists are (nor should they be) about productivity, however. More often than not, I’ve needed to pull myself out of a negative thought spiral or an anxiety trip, and one way I counter that sort of thinking in the moment is to write lists of things for which I’m grateful, or happy or excited about. Just forcing myself to come up with enough stuff to fill even half a page is such a rewarding exercise and quite literally stops the unrelenting train of pessimism in its tracks. It doesn’t necessarily solve whatever issue triggered the anger, sorrow or fretfulness, but it makes us feel a bit better and gives us some much-needed perspective so that we can move to a place of action in a calm, methodical way.

While planning this blog post, I figured psychology must have something to say about the concept of list-writing, and turns out it does! A 2017 article from The Guardian explores some of the findings unearthed over the years, such as:

• The fact that our brains are obsessed with unfinished tasks (dubbed the Zeigarnik effect after the psychologist who observed this phenomenon in waiters, whose memories prioritised diners’ orders before serving them and then forgot those same orders thereafter)

• The fact that merely penning a list outlining what needs to be done frees us of anxiety, and just having this list there means we tend not to underperform on the task in which we are currently engaged

While in college, I became aware of a fascinating area of psychology known as embodiment, or embodied cognition. This is when the individual manipulates the spatial environment in order to come to a particular thought, or cognition. Traditionally in psychology, behaviour is thought of as the result of a thought process, but embodiment flips this on its head and purports that sometimes it is the behaviour that in fact causes thinking, learning and problem-solving. Examples of embodiment include calendars, counting on one’s fingers, and pairing actions to song lyrics. Our bodies and/or physical environments play an active part in allowing our brains to process what is going on, and, in the instance of to-do lists, what needs to be achieved.

My own advice for writing the perfect to-do list goes as follows, and wouldn’t you KNOW it would be in list format:

• Keep the list short - I would recommend about 3-5 things. Too long and it’s daunting - it’ll feel like no matter what you have done, there’s so much MORE that isn’t done

• Word each task as specifically as possible - “Study for college” is vague and frankly too massive, whereas “Read back over notes for Module X” is way more manageable

• Writing a list first thing in the morning - or better yet, the night before - is a great way to give structure to the rest of the day and get those burdensome tasks out of the way early

• Maintain a healthy relationship with lists - they don’t need to be laid out every day, and if some things on your list don’t get done, they don’t get done! Tomorrow is a new day

So whether or not reading this blog post was on your to-do list for this evening, I appreciate you having taken the time out to do so anyway, and would encourage you to start using lists as a way to raise awareness about general productivity and wider, long-term goals.