A few years ago Joanna Nolan, an academic at SOAS, contacted me asking to take part in her study about writing lists. I gasped and clutched the edge of the table and then sent her a 1,500 word email about my lists: what of, why, when, how. List are my life and they always have been. I am acquisitive - extremely into stuff - and some of my earliest lists were of things that I wanted. Now, my lists are all of things to do and grocery shopping. And they are everywhere. I find them in pockets, down the side of bags, underfoot, crumpled up in corners. They litter the place.
Nolan took this ranting nonsense and put it together with other testimonies, wrote a paper and is now turning it into a book: Listful. It is out on 18th September - I have read it and it is a terrific, quirky read and I recommend it to you.
In order to mark this, Joanna has written us a short piece in celebration of The List. Find her on Instagram at @listfulbook.
Joanna writes:
September is very much a month for lists. Back to school. Starting university. Even – whisper it – getting yourself ready for Christmas…
But, really, isn’t every month a month for lists? January – the resolutions: New Year, New You!, February – re-evaluated and substantially reduced resolutions, Valentine’s / ½ term plans, March – Easter Holidays, Spring-Summer wardrobe revamp, likely also the already looming Summer holiday logistics. I could go on. Each month has its place on the list calendar, (December is likely to trump all others – or perhaps November if you’re reading this in the US), but I’m not sure why I’m framing this in terms of months.
Every day is a list day. At least in my house, and I can’t imagine I’m alone in this. There’s a shopping list and a to-do list without fail. For some there may even be a ta-da list too – the list of all you’ve achieved, be that in your head, in a performative conversation with your other half or a series of rhetorical questions to your utterly uninterested offspring, or – in the case of many men – an actual written ‘done’ list.
Why is that? Why do we make so many lists? Is it a ‘grasp for the incomprehensible’ aa Umberto Eco once wrote? An itemization of our overcrowded and absurdly diverse lives? Is it the reassurance that if we’ve put it on the list we are less likely to forget to do / buy / send it?
Neuropsychologists endorse this – writing something down of course creates an actual record on a page, but also generates (it’s literally known as ‘the generation effect’) a memory through the engagement of the senses: the contact of pen on paper stimulates a part of the brain that logs the thought. Or is it for the sheer love of a tick (or crossing off / scrubbing out)? Again, neuroscience confirms that a tiny flood of dopamine is released every time we indicate to ourselves that an item on the list has been achieved. As more than one of my interviewees observed, the joy of ticking off a list can vastly outweigh the pleasure of achieving the actual task.
In Listful, I explore all this and much more – from the language we use in lists to the materials we choose (and cannot deviate from) to make them, and the reverence withwhich we view them - for, as Eco, again, observed, ‘there is nothing more wonderful than a list’!
How about you? Are you a list person - or are you a maniac? Please leave a comment in the handy box below. Where do you write lists. What about. Do you need a special pen? Do you buy notebooks only for lists? Be specific.
My Dad was a life long list maker at home and as a headmaster. His handwritten lists of every pupil’s O and A level results were a thing of beauty.
Clearing his desk after his recent death has been so poignant. What to do with all the lists; world birds spotted, UK beers drunk, my collections, jokes I’ve liked. Endless lists all hand written and carefully filed. I can’t bring myself to throw away all that order but what to do with them?
I love this so much ! Im a massive list maker as are both my girls (so proud). I’m definitely getting your book Joanna.
I use my children’s old school notebooks- you know, the ones they send home at the end of July.
I will check out Keeper as 85% of conversations with husband is lists of stuff we need to do!