The List
How To To-Do List Do Change Your World
I really fucking love The List.
The List is the set, the dictionary, the collection of data, the categories of life. The List is a recursive structure of structure, of facts built within facts. The List is the stack, the names of all those functions that are flowing by, of all those actions within actions that are happening and yet to happen. The List is a concept that holds all the other concepts, and acts upon those concepts. The List contains the feed, and to control the List is to control the feed. The List is the Words, and the Words were in the List.
There are, roughly, two sides of The List. There is the Prescriptive List and the Descriptive List.
The Descriptive List contains the ring sizes for every finger on my hand. It has the dates that every one of my friends was born, and it has the dates of every one of my friends’ kids’ birth dates so far. It contains the titles of most of the books that I’ve read. It contains most of the movies and most of the TV shows. It has my favorite bars in ranked order.
The Descriptive List is a list.
The Prescriptive List is a recursive bucket list, a repetitive bucket list, an ever expanding and retracting list. It is easier to understand The List when you write out a list of components of the Prescriptive List:
Email (to respond to, convert to actions)
Slack messages (to respond to, convert to actions, read)
Calendar (meetings to go to, time blocks)
ToDoist (projects, recurring chores, travel planning, event planning)
Messenger (things to respond to)
Bucket Lists (notes apps with things to do)
Chrome tabs (things to read, finish, share)
Feedly (RSS articles to read)
Daily To Do List (notes app jottings)
Meeting Next Steps (meeting notes with to-dos attached)
Objects on the fucking floor (things I haven't put away because I plan on doing something with them and them being there reminds me)
Calendar App? Chrome Tabs? These aren’t words in a document delineated by <li>, they’re not rows in a Notion database. And yet, they are part of The List.
The functions, the needs, the impulses of an organism are there in The List. My cat, sitting in my lap, eats, sleeps, drinks, shits, warms herself. She moves through the List. I jot down what she has done on the List.
The List expands backwards to the Big Bang, putting all the quantum events in their place. The List explodes forwards into the Future, describing all the things that can be done if they’re done. When the Unified Theory of Everything is finally found and Man can say, “I found God, there She is”, Man will print out the results of the theory and the theory will be The List.