From To Do to Done
It’s the season of new lists. Of the school-year-starting, getting-ready-for winter, pre-Thanksgiving-menu-planning, upcoming-Christmas-shopping list-making. Like some of my island pals dragging our feet toward the first frost, I’m still ticking my way through an end-of-season chores list – stacking firewood, storing lawn furniture, cutting back the perennials, rigging the deer fencing. Soon, I’ll tackle what waits on my companion list – emptying the fridge, turning off the water – all the requisite To-Dos as I get ready for my annual migration back to Chicago where I spend most of the winter.
Lists are a relatively simple way to organize what otherwise might be a muddled mess. For me, they’re essential, a reliable tool. Sure, a hefty To Do list is a nagging reminder, often of quotidian life pressing in. But using one, I can prioritize, create a structure, maintain some order. I also love a list’s promise of accomplishment, the way simple checkmarks transform To Do to Done. The time spent making lists is, in the end, usually time-saving. And what, without them, might I forget or overlook? The unmailed birthday card? The missed dentist appointment?
Task-oriented lists are probably what’s conjured when referencing list-making, but the world around us is and has always been awash with lists – as Phil Patton’s New York Times opinion piece, “Our Longing for Lists,” recently reminded me. Think about it. Best seller lists. The life lists of birders. Netflix queues. Recipes. Address and contact lists. Those cleanliness inspection lists posted on the doors of public bathrooms. Or, emblazoned on magazine covers, the titles of articles featuring sure-fire tips and instructions on how to flatten your belly, spice things up in bed, make a small room look bigger without breaking the budget – all typically simplified into a step-by-step list. Even menus are a type of list. Patton, for example, points to the Waffle House chain and its listed options for ordering hash browns that, in addition to various portion sizes, can be smothered, covered, chunked, diced, peppered, capped, or topped.
We are living in the era of the list. Its “golden age,” asserts Patton – notwithstanding the Ten Commandments or the cataloguing list-making of epic poetry dating back to Homer and Milton. We are, he says, infected with “list thinking,” thanks in no small part to our computers, Internet access, easily updated electronic lists, and our reputedly decreasing attention spans. Perhaps it’s also why checklists, serious kin to our mundane To Do lists, are more ubiquitous and essential than ever – the kind of orderly procedures by which our expanding knowledge and technological know-how are maintained.
This is vividly portrayed in The Checklist Manifesto. Often by way of riveting stories, author and surgeon Atul Gawande explores the utility of the checklist in numerous fields. No mere quality control device, the checklist is a response to increasing high-tech complexities, the ratcheted-up responsibilities of myriad high-paced eventualities, and the challenges of modern medicine. Similarly, in aviation, as Patton points out, former NASA astronaut James Lovell created a pre-flight 70-page checklist that ultimately helped him guide Apollo 13 back to Earth after a systems malfunction. More recently, Captain “Sullie” Sullenberger relied on his knowledge of an “engine out” checklist to safely ditch an Airbus into the Hudson River. In both cases, checklists inherent with potential narratives became high drama.
As one of our most common forms of documentation, lists are often historically important. No, my list atop my kitchen counter, with its reminders to install the roof rack on the car, call the plumber and fill out the mail forwarding form at the post office, is not the bit historically significant. Nor is the adjacent list that includes garlic for this weekend’s pork roast and Arborio rice for a spinach risotto. They’d never even make it into this small island’s Historical Society archives. At best, they’re mere snapshots of a particular person at a particular time. And do they, I wonder, say any more about me than my frequently updated reading list or my ever-evolving Save for Later shopping cart on Amazon?
Just as personal dramas hide within complex checklists, lists of various sorts can reveal the experience and preferences of their makers. Often, they record observations and recollections, and offer intimate insight into habits and personalities.
As a writer, I’m particularly drawn to the type of literary lists featured on the Listsofnote website. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, seems to have had a penchant for list-making. He once offered 13 ways to use leftover turkey. As the holidays approach, this suggests some usefulness, but his list is meant to be amusing, including the caveat “to have a few ham sandwiches standing by, just in case.” More revealing is Fitzgerald’s advice to his young daughter, a “Things to Worry About” list that proves more extensive in things not to worry about. In 1908, Rudyard Kipling listed for his 12-year old daughter “Simple Rules for Life in London.” They included: “Never eat penny buns, oysters, periwinkles and peppermints on the top of a double-decker bus. It annoys the passengers.” (No mention made if this was true elsewhere on the bus.) An earlier maker of lists, Ben Franklin, in 1726, enumerated 13 virtues, an attempt, he wrote, “to live without committing any fault at any time.” (No follow up indicates whether this was achieved.) Of more recent vintage are the 47 alternative names that the Disney writing team proposed for the Seven Dwarfs and could’ve given us Burpy, Flabbo and Woeful.
Some lists have monetary value. A "Things To Do Today" list penned by the late Johnny Cash sold at auction for $6,250.
Johnny Cash’s To-Do list sold at auction
Other lists prove museum-worthy. A 2011 exhibition at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum presented 80 lists made by a broad range of artists. Most well-known is Picasso’s recommendations of artists for the internationally ground-breaking 1913 Armory show of Modern art. In 1938, William E. Bunn compiled a “grief list” about the shortcomings of the New Deal mural he’d recently finished in which he failed to: “Put in the buffalo skull.” “Glaze the stagecoach.” “Doctor the white ox.” It should come as no surprise that the lists of some artists are illustrated. A packing list for a trip to Europe, what for most of us is prosaically rendered in text, was transformed by Adolf Konrad into sketches of the clothes and other essentials he’d take. Odd, though, as pointed out by exhibition reviewer Charles McGrath, was the omission of shoes. One that possibly led to an “uh-oh” moment on arrival?
McGrath’s review title – “l. Make List; 2. Do Stuff” – suggests that for all our romantic, possibly “other worldly” notions about artists, they are like us. Their lists, too, even if collaged and colored, reveal the urgency of everyday, of appointments to keep, bills to pay, people to call. Among his notes about major upcoming projects, famed architect Eero Saarinen mixed in reminders that he needed to repair a door and fix some lights in his living room – chores that were never done. Saarinen died a short time later.
And that’s sort of the bottom line, isn’t it? That we never get to the end of our lists. All the lists we add to, update. Of what we’ve done and have yet to do. The new lists we start. Of what we want – hope – to do before the curtain drops. Like bucket lists that seem to me more popular than ever – unless it’s just that I and most of my pals are of a “certain age.”
Certainly no bucket list, but one of the more poignant lists I read this year is that of noted essayist, filmmaker and screenwriter Nora Ephron who, in June, at 71, lost her six-year battle with leukemia. Written in 2010 and used to close her last book, Ephron lists “What I Won’t Miss,” and, more heartbreakingly, “What I Will Miss” – Her kids. Her husband. Taking a bath. Coming over the bridge into Manhattan. Pie. A long list that, I’m certain, was incomplete. In the way that, in the end, whether written down or kept in our heads, our lists are never completed.
But we keep on making them. Out of necessity. And, in part, too, I think, for the forward movement lists imply, and with faith there’s time left to us to work our way through them. And yes, for the small satisfactions. The kind I recognize as I reach for my nearby list, and there, find it: “Post new blog.” Check.