Lists are a universal tool for productivity, everything can be compound into a list or can be considered one. For example, the post-its that you have in your office wall they can be treated as a list, you can handle it recursively, putting new lists inside a list.
We are presented to lists being a child and they follow us for our entire life, it’s an easier way to create a condensed, simplistic way to arrange data to be used. You even can have specific lists that are being written as an ordered way to instruct someone to do something, like a cooking recipe or a tutorial.
You can compound and have a lot of useful data that contextualizes you about everything in a specific scope by doing a list, like me, that does a list about the key points that I want to write about in this post.
The fact that you can build this solution in a lot of different solutions helps us to maintain a lot of lists easier. You can have your supermarket lists written in pieces of paper, a list of blogs that you follow written in a gist in GitHub, or even a thread at Twitter with the list of the coolest blog posts that you read, like me.
Being a forgetful person with a considerably low attention-span, I found in lists an useful, disciplined way to go through my daily routine. I have lists to handle it , like:
- What I need to do on my job or at home;
- What are the meetings;
- What I need to follow-up;
- What I didn’t do;
These to-do lists helps me to handle my routine in an easier way, helping me to be a more organized person. Furthermore, it gives me an visibility and tracking about the things that I need to do, the urgency of them and I missed on my daily activities or my daily habits.
I also handle more than my daily tasks in this structure, I like to put all my useful resources into it. My notes has a lot of lists around it. For example:
- A list for the blogs and podcasts that I like to follow;
- What are the tracking of the books that I’m reading (or already read) over the year;
- Useful links for articles or tool resources that I believe will be useful at some moment;
- And every resource that I believe will be useful for me at some moment.
Lists can express a great range of communication between two or more people, they give you all the insights and the scopes related to a subject. You can structure it like a checkbox of items containing the things that you need to do with their priorities, or like an ordered list containing your favorite cooking recipe, or just an unordered list containing the summary of the presentation of a course.
They are an universal, easily tool of thought that helps us to derive through your day and the entire range of things happening at the same time.
Given this versatility to arrange the content and the fact that you can put everywhere, like a piece of paper, a computer file or even just structuring your thoughts as a list of things, it’s what make me an enjoyer of lists and why I think that other people should be too.
This is my ode to lists. Thanks.
I would especially like to thank @Eckzzo and @fersilvaa16 who helped review this post. Thank you very much guys.