Mindful Content: Pursuing Multiple List-gasms

By Marcus Coates

Blog #5 – 2nd October 2020

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For the love of a good list

I love a good list. I make lists of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly chores. I have a 5-year life plan list of goals I’d like to achieve (courses, destinations, promotions and writing projects). I have a bucket list of countries I’d like to visit and things I’d like to do in those countries before I pop my clogs. I have a list of retirement hobbies for when I retire fifteen years from now (one hobby is to compile a database of all my lists). And I have lists with my top twenty favourite books I’ve read and a top twenty list for books I’m planning to read (I also plan on making a list of top twenty books to avoid). I have a list of films with a star rating system I’ve developed for myself; a ‘one to five’ – with one being I’ll only watch under extreme duress to be polite to a friend and five being the ones to repeat watch). Then there’s my lists for puns, maxims, fancy words, and film quotes. I have a list of publishing houses I’d approach if I ever felt my novels were ready for publication. I also have a list with the rooms I’d like in my retirement house and a list of the furniture I’d put in each room of my retirement house. I have a series of packing lists for when I travel (short, intermediate and long journeys). Then there are my recipe lists for food I’m planning to cook for the coming week or would like to cook sometime within my lifespan.

And sometimes, when I’ve run out of list ideas, I like nothing better than to sit down with a nice cup of tea and refine a top-twenty list and turn it into a top-five list.

As I said, I am a man who loves a good list.

The daily chores list

I realise that that’s probably a lot of lists to cover in one article, so for this blog, I’ll focus purely on the merits and possible pitfalls of ‘the daily chores list’.

Now, for me, as with all my lists, I go old-school style and use a pen and jot down my list of ‘to do’ tasks on a sheet of A4 paper, one item placed under the other, as in the example list below:

‘To do’

Check social media

Eat breakfast

Write

Tidy the apartment

Exercise

Wash the car

Wash self

Go to bed

Now, you might have noticed that the above list lacks detail and time constraints. It’s not a deeply satisfying list. It has a flimsy structure and isn’t particularly challenging. Therefore, I’d suggest adding more detail and blocks of timing to level up the challenge of your daily chores and gain a deeper level of satisfaction. For example:

‘To do’ list 2nd October 2020 – Friday (with timings and detail)

7.00 – 9.00 Flexi – stay in bed and read or get up and look around

9.00 – 10.00 Check social media – focus on saved articles and scattering your opinions about across all media platforms (‘like’ ten posts, i.e. random acts of kindness)

10.00 – 11.00 Eat breakfast (something decadent)

11.00 – 13.00 Write – next chapter + research up on potentially habitable planets for next sci-fi story

13.00 – 14.30 Tidy the apartment – hoover, mop and dust … maybe clean the loo (eat the frog)

14.30 – 15.30 Exercise – cardio today! If nothing else … take a walk and think of making lists

15.30 – 16.30 Shower and rest (you earnt it!)

16.30 – 17.30 Cook – use the three-day-old vegetables in the fridge and cover with an exotic sauce

17.30 – 18.30 Eat – try to forget your eating old vegetables disguised with sauce

18.30 - 19.30 Wash the car

19.30 - 20.30 Wash self (behind ears as well)

20.30 – 21.30 Write (again) … but more seriously this time

21.30 – 22.30 Make a list for tomorrow (or imaginary future list or refine an existing list)

22.30 – 23.30 Go to bed (and consolidate list in your head – dream about morning list)

As you can see from the above list, adding timings and more detail vastly improves the quality of your ‘to do’ list. There’s variety, challenge and scope. You can almost visualise the joy of crossing out each item on the list.

But a quick word of warning, there are a few rookie errors that the first-time list-maker might make and lose heart from.

Rookie errors

· Too easy & gratuitous

It’s quite tempting to make your list super-easy to be able to cross off items gratuitously; for example: get out of bed, drink coffee, have a poo, make breakfast, etc. Yes, there is a level of satisfaction involved in crossing an item off, but really, you know you can handle more challenge. Up your game, list-makers!

· Multi-list fiasco

Sometimes, in my rush to get ideas down, I used to have multiple lists on the go at once. Initially, I did this with the intention of being able to cross out the same item multiple times on different lists and gain cheap satisfaction. After a while, though, this backfired and I found that I had omitted some things on some lists and sometimes couldn’t find one or several of the lists at all. In the end, I had to spend a day consolidating all my lists and I now have one centralised list in a prominent spot in my apartment.

Do not go down the multi-list rabbit hole; it’s a scary place.

· Too ambitious

Now, the opposite end of the spectrum from the super-easy list is the over-ambitious list. If you try to cram too much in a day, you’ll only set yourself up for a fall and be disheartened.

For the ambitious list-makers amongst you, I’d refer you back to my list above. Notice that in the morning there is flexi-time built-in (2 hours to stay in bed or get up); possibility (maybe clean the loo); and multi-tasking (sleep and dream about list-making).

Pro tip 1: eat the frog

When I first heard the trainer on a leadership course I attended state “You should ‘eat the frog’ early every day.” I presumed he meant we should all be more French in attitude and eat cream-based and amphibious foodstuffs and go on strike a lot. However, what he meant was that we should do an unpleasant task early each day: get it over and done with (as in the list example ‘clean the loo’).

Pro tip 2: carryover

This one ties in with being over-ambitious in list-making and eating the frog. If you can’t achieve all your tasks in a day, don’t worry, carry them over to the next day and make the missed items the ‘frogs of the next day.’ Also, if you continue to carry many things over for many days, weeks, or even years, you'll be able to make a decent ’My favourite top 20 procrastination activities’ list.

Pro tip 3: A4 paper and a pen are your best friends

Every list-maker deserves good quality tools. My recommendations are, for paper, use Boise X-9 Multi-Use Copy Paper, 8.5” x 11”, Bright White – this gained a 9.6 score rating in the BestReviews.Guide for 2020 (https://uk.bestreviews.guide/printer-papers); and for the pen: the Uni-ball Vision Elite Rollerball Pen with a 0.8mm line size, this writes like a dream (https://www.tomsguide.com/best-picks/best-pens).

The hidden list

Now, I realise that not everyone is sold on the beauty of a good list. I get it. My son is a classic example. If he so much as sees two items, one below the other on a sheet of paper, he goes into a purple rage and shouts out that his basic rights of freedom are being infringed upon and he is being oppressed by the very people who should be loving and supporting him.

To me, I see this as the generational rebellion cycle. Most sons or daughters instinctively detest the things that their parents enthuse about (lists of household chores, reading books, getting out of bed at a sensible hour, going to bed at a sensible hour, washing their bodies, etc.)

To these rebellious youths (who will learn to love the list one day), I say, hide the list from them – like you’d hide the things they hate to eat under or inside the things they like to eat. Drip feed them one item at a time from the list until they’ve unknowingly completed all the things on the list. Chuck in a bribe if needs be: ”If you tidy your room and take the plates out from under your bed, you don't have to shower for a week,” for example.

Just know in your heart that one day, they will be mature enough to look at two or more tasks on a piece of paper, one under the other, without raging.

Film & literature are on my side

Despite the list-haters, I know that literature and film are on my side. In Prison Break, the character of Michael Scofield takes list-making to the next level by tattooing his whole body into an elaborate blueprint of the prison he plans to break his brother and himself out from. In the neo-noir psychological thriller Memento, Guy Pearce’s character with a very bad memory uses an elaborate system of Polaroid photos and tattoos to help him to track down his wife’s killers.

More recently, in Game of Thrones, Maisie Williams as Arya Stark had a ‘kill list’ of people she was planning to grimly take out and recited these as a kind of lullaby each night (I don’t have a kill list by the way … although maybe I should think about making one.) And Nick Hornby wrote a great book, High Fidelity, where his main character, Rob the record store owner, revisits all the women on his list of women who dumped him to find out what he’s doing wrong in relationships.

And then there’s the most famous of them all - Schindler’s List – an entire film about a list that even has the word ‘list’ in the title.

This film with a person’s list as its premise netted Steven Spielberg a cool $321.3 million at the box office and got him onto numerous lists of Oscar awards (see how one list leads to another?).

Extreme list-making

I think we can agree: when penned properly, with clear measurable timings, and the right level of challenge, done properly, the list can be a sublime, transcendental life-altering experience, akin to the runner’s high and the surfer’s perfect wave.

Let me explain a little more: at some point whilst running a marathon, the runner hits ’the wall’ and their legs go wobbly and he or she feels like another step can’t be taken; then from somewhere deep within, the runner’s mind and body synergise and they suddenly feel like they could run on forever.

The surfer, up early and out in freezing water, bobs up and down and catches a selection of spotty waves and feels like calling it a day, then from deep out in the ocean, a swell gathers pace and a glorious wave looms larger and larger – the surfer flips the board shoreward and paddles and is suddenly up and riding the wave of his life.

That’s how it is with the perfectly formed and executed list: you wake up and see your list, then strike an item off, then another and another – your timing is perfect and on the hour every hour throughout the day a new task is done – you realise you are in a state of list-o-phoria.

And there’s more … suddenly, your pen is striking through the last of the chores of the night and you’re left standing, triumphant, jubilant, with twenty items crossed off and all at the exact time as you planned – you, my friend, have just experienced what’s known on the street as the list-gasm.

And taking this one step further, for those pursuing the ultimate list high, if you manage to achieve the perfect list on simultaneous occasions, then you will have experienced multiple list-gasms. And surely, that’s a worthwhile pursuit.

If you visit my new business page on the website www.mc-mindful-content.com you'll find a free downloadable pdf list template. Happy list-making!

Marcus is a Curriculum Designer who is passionate about creative, academic & business writing. He blogs about lifestyle choices and the writing process.

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All images are taken from Unsplash: 1 - Nicolas Tissot, 2 - Laurence@natnoe, 3 - Chandler Cruttenden, 4 - Kyle Glenn, 5 Josh Kahen, 6 Tomas Robertson, 7 - Nicolas Tissot