A Post a Day in May #12: Do you do lists?

I have pledged to write a new post for this blog every day in May. 

You either make them or you don’t. We could likely divide the world’s population into two camps: “Make lists” and “Wouldn’t be caught dead making a list”. Me? I fall firmly into the “Make lists” camp. 

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Yes, I make lists to keep me on track and to ensure I actually do what needs doing — water the garden, take out the recycling, buy milk, pump up bike tires, and so on. 

However, deep down, I make lists because a fully achieved list, a list on which every item is struck through with a confident line, a list that has been well and truly conquered, is a list that gives the satisfaction of several or many things having been done, i.e., brought to an end, closed, terminated. It is not the doing of the individual items that gives me joy. It is this beautiful state of completion that makes me love lists. 

Sometimes, I play with the list. Sometimes, I amend it even after it has been wrestled to the ground through iron-willed determination. At those times, I will add a task or chore on to the list that I accomplished along the way even though I had not originally intended to tackle it. This amendment makes the list tell a different story and is, therefore, more satisfying to me.

I am reminded in those instances of William Zinsser who wrote much about writing and of whose oeuvre I remember two sentences in particular: “I don’t like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite…” (from On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-fiction, 1976). Of course, he is referring to loftier writing than quotidian lists; however, his wisdom holds true, nonetheless. 

Writing first, hard as it may be, is essential. There is no rewriting without an original text. But the real craft of writing, even when it’s only a list to guide your day’s activities — the real craft lies in revising that first draft to be what you actually want to say. To reflect what you actually did.

Lists? I make ‘em. And then I remake ‘em to tell the best story I can pull from an ordinary day. Because, sometimes, your ordinary day needs a bit of sprucing up. 

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