Friday Feature: Why We Like Lists

It's strange for me to be writing this post after 1:30 on a Friday afternoon. These Friday Feature posts are usually the first thing I tackle on Friday mornings and, sometimes, I even get them done on Thursday night. But, since I had an appointment this morning that would get me out of the house earlier than usual, I clustered a bunch of errands together and did those before settling in to write this post.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because when I got home after two hours of running from place to place, I was hot (it's 93 degrees outside, according to Siri), but not frazzled. Instead, I felt accomplished. Lighter, even. The things that had been weighing me down were done and I was free to move on to the things I wanted to do.

Which got me thinking. Why do we get such a sense of accomplishment out of checking things off our lists? I know another list is lurking in the wings, its items lining up like so many actors preparing to make an entrance, but still, revel in that neat line of check marks.

So, I looked it up, and found a nice, succinct article in The Guardian by Louise Chunn that sums it all up rather nicely. According to Dr. David Cohen, who sounds like someone I want to meet (his family thinks he's "chaotic," but he credits his lists with keeping him from being just that), the satisfaction we get from checking things off those lists begins with the lists themselves.

"Cohen puts our love of to-do lists down to three reasons: they dampen anxiety about the chaos of life; they give us a structure, a plan that we can stick to; and they are proof of what we have achieved that day, week or month."

Sounds about right.

I'm less keen to meet another of Chunn's sources, "time management expert David Allen." (Not a fan of experts who write off a whole population as "wrong"). Allen says our lists need to be specific, too, in order for us to be productive. I disagree -- a key word is often all I need as a line item on my lists -- but I guess that would make me wrong.

Regardless of how I should make my lists or why checking things off them makes me happy, I am pleased to have tackled them this morning. Not only are those things off my mind (and my list), I can now sit in my air-conditioned house and write instead of running around during the hottest part of the day.

Rewarding indeed.