We were jotting down a few items for our customary Saturday errand list when we heard about a new Web site dedicated to lists. It’s called Meosphere — a perfect name, really — and it offers list enthusiasts a chance to compile lists in at least 2,500 categories. Examples: Audis you wrecked. National parks you visited. Fads you’ve done, worn or bought.
Then, when you’re done, you can e-mail the list to your friends and relatives so they can drool with envy or try to match your lists with their own. Yes, it’s competitive listing. It’s not as big yet as, say, those egregiously ridiculous hot-dog eating contests, but give it time.
For many the urge to create a list is primal. Who can’t admire the power and beauty of one executive’s 450-item checklist for a leadership class he teaches, memorialized by The Wall Street Journal. And what about the book that is a collection of grocery lists that the author found in the trash. Or listing goddess Jennifer Scully-Lerner, a Manhattan exec who, the paper marvels, “using Microsoft Word, Excel, errant scraps of paper and her BlackBerry … makes lists that govern almost every aspect of her life. She has lists of work projects all around her desk. There’s a packing list on her closet wall, to simplify the preparations for her frequent business trips. She has emergency lists at home and at work. She keeps lists of books to read, phone calls to make and presents to buy. She also maintains a list of gifts she’d like others to give to her.”
Awesome. Could the Olympics be missing a major competitive sport here?
The perfect list leaves nothing to chance. There’s the rudimentary yet highly satisfying to-do list. Ideally, it should be calibrated perfectly to fill Saturday and Saturday only. That leaves Sunday as a day of the blessedly blank list, nothing to do. There’s the more lofty genre, along the lines of the aspirational 87 Things to Do Before You Die-type list. (That’s the one with Learn Latin and Paddle the Nile on it.)
Some people might laugh. (Scratch that. Some people do laugh.) They run their lives listlessly. They careen from chore to chore, errand to errand, haphazardly. If they remember, it gets done. If not, who cares?
Other people are dabblers. They compile multiple lists on post-it note pads, which often end up crammed into the candy drawer or slipping behind the furniture, never to be excavated. Our suspicion: They never really intend to do anything on their to-do roster. They’re pretenders.
Full disclosure: The writer of this editorial has been known to carry a legal pad scrawled with lists of possible topics for editorials, drawing gimlet-eyed scrutiny from other editorial board members.
As old lists get tossed, and new ones are made, perennial entries cling from list to list: transfer VHS movies of family to DVD, for example. Other entries also remain tauntingly out of reach. For example: Renovate the house.
Once the item exists, it nags you. It haunts you. It must be fulfilled. It cannot be ignored.
The list provides the illusion of control. It’s the power of pure thought, of organizational prowess and mighty motivation.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the list can become an addiction. One colleague swore off lists when she realized that sometimes she’d add something to the list after she’d already done it, just so she could cross it off. “I nearly checked myself into a 12-step program after that,” she said. “It was like you couldn’t get credit for it unless it was on the list.” Exactly.
Remember that list of possible editorial ideas we mentioned? It’s one entry shorter.
