It is that time of the year when we wonder if it’s worth making a list of resolutions – from losing weight to becoming more productive to living life to the full.
There is a time to dance and a time to mourn and the end of year is the time of lists: from simple to-do lists to lists of personal goals to bucket lists.
The productivity experts and life coaches are not in doubt. They urge us to keep lists.
They practise what they preach by giving us a series of lists: the pros and cons of handwritten vs online lists; what should be done immediately; what needs to be reviewed every hour; what needs to be batched together; what needs to go into a calendar; what apps we can find to help us keep better-organised lists…
They point us to history’s exemplars. Famous keepers of to-do lists include Leonardo da Vinci, whose lists often read like resolutions since they encapsulated projects and far-reaching goals.
One list, dating from 1490, included 15 items. Among them: calculate ‘the measurement of Milan and the suburbs’; ‘ask Benedetto Potinari by what means they go on ice in Flanders’; and ‘examine the crossbow of Mastro Giannetto’.
He was still keeping such lists 20 years later, although by then his interests had shifted to anatomy: ‘describe the tongue of a woodpecker'.
Today, the billionaire who swears by the far-reaching resolution list is Richard Branson. A few years ago, he published a to-do list he had written in his diary on November 6, 1972, when he was 22. The eight items included: ‘learn to fly’; ‘entertain everybody with me’; ‘invite nice people back’; and ‘more shops to found’.
Branson’s lists generate other lists – from sub-goals to lists that keep track of progress. As his 50-year-old list shows, his resolution lists censor nothing out, however wild a resolution might seem.
Some of the most famous doers of our age, like Bill Gates, claim to eschew making lists. They must have the scribbled note in mind. They do indeed keep lists when (as Gates says about himself) they work from the tasks on their online calendar (dividing each hour into 15-minute segments) and their inbox, with its list of prioritised e-mails.
The great benefit of resolution lists is that they can show us to be larger than how we define ourselves. Their heterogeneity reveals our multiple selves. They help us impose order on those impulses, which pull us in every direction.
Contemporary popular culture wouldn’t be possible without lists- Ranier Fsadni
We could call our lists a kind of inventory of ourselves. It would include, of course, our procrastination and failures to stick by them. Lists help us take stock.
Long lists can give us a glimpse of the sublime and wildness that lies in wait within us. Learn from the classics of literature to leave nothing out. In the Iliad, Homer conveys the sublime war machine heading towards Troy by giving a 265-line catalogue of the 1,186 ships setting sail. In Paradise Lost, Milton gave us the names of every fallen angel marching into Hell.
In Tender Is The Night, Scott Fitzgerald tells us what we need to know about Nicole from her shopping. Mark Twain gave us a list of every object that made up Tom Sawyer’s wealth – from a key that opened no lock to the blue rim of a broken bottle that could serve as a pretend eyeglass – perhaps the greatest gratitude list ever written, heart-warming yet without schlock.
Contemporary popular culture wouldn’t be possible without lists. The Ikea catalogue is today as popular as the Bible and the Quran. In an economy fighting for our increasingly short attention span, the online world of clickbait has created a new genre, the ‘listicle’, which can list anything from the ‘Top 10 Guitar Intros’ to the ‘7 Things You Need to Know to Capture an Audience’s Attention’ to the ‘5 Takeaways From the Budget’.
It is difficult to write about lists without compiling one. The list spawns itself. There are lists of lists and books of lists: of words (dictionaries); people (who’s who); dates and events (almanacs); items of knowledge (encyclopaedias); items of objects (catalogues), and lists of lists that you should learn to keep.
With so many lists around, it should not be difficult to keep one or several. There are few cultural barriers to keeping lists and plenty of incentives.
A list does not need punctuation marks but it will permit you, should you wish, to flaunt your knowledge of the semi-colon, whose key function today is to separate items on a list written in connected prose. It is largely thanks to the list that the semi-colon has survived the contemporary informal writing style that wages war on all punctuation, including commas.
There is no genre of writing quite like the list: it spans from the hastily scribbled to-do list to the classics of literature to food labels and the listicle; it unites epic procrastinators with legendary doers; a resolution list is split into lines like verse, its words as workman-like and dream-filled as poetry; the list has survived every medium of writing, from the clay tablet to the digital one, the scrolled papyrus to the scrolled screen.
The only danger is its compulsiveness. Then again, if list-making begins to overtake your life, you can always put cutting it on next year’s resolutions list.