Why I Stopped Making “To-Do” Lists for My Life

"We like lists because we don't want to die"

In my living room are three cabinets, all filled with books.

They are the only conversation piece in my home, if you don’t count my dog. Rows of books of different colors and sizes tend to draw the eye. More than one person has asked me, “So, how many of these have you read?”

This question used to make me sheepish. A lot of these books I’ve had since high school, and some are even older (including several “I-Spy” books that I still love to riffle through). You would think I’ve read almost all of them but the honest answer is, I’m not sure it’s even half. For much of my life, I looked at books — and travel destinations and other experiences — as feats. Yes, there was enjoyment in them, but the idea of finishing them was every bit as important. If I didn’t finish them, I’d somehow failed. Each unfinished book was a tiny death.

So I created lists. Lots of them. Not just for books, but for everything I wanted to learn and do. Arabic. Surfing. Cage diving with sharks. A pen and a piece of paper, or even a napkin from the ice cream parlor, was all I needed to capture them all. Seeing them written down made it feel more possible. And that possibility meant that I kept adding to the list.

Lists are interesting because they serve multiple purposes, although we usually think of them as serving only one: Remembering. At their best, lists are an a tool. They are there to serve us. The telos of a list is to remind us, help us visualize, and progress. The timelier the matter, the more obvious the need for a list. There is nothing controversial about a grocery list because we need milk and bread, not eggs and onions. Our grocery needs are finite and boring.

But our reading needs, our travel needs, our bucket list needs are infinite and emotional. In fact, they aren’t needs. They are wants. And as soon as a list of needs becomes a list of wants, it becomes a more more complex thing.

The problem with existential “to-do” lists

I don’t think it’s just me who’s run into this phenomenon.

Our busy modern world celebrates goal-making and list-making. It’s how you squeeze the most possible novelty out of your one wild and precious life. Take Goodreads, who issues a reading challenge every year and encourages book lovers to pick a number (ideally higher than 12) and chart their progress in public. Existential “to-do” lists give us a hit of dopamine every time we look at them, not just to see how far we’ve come but how far we hope to go. They are imagination, visualized. They make our hopes tangible.

They also depend on a feeling of lack and endless hunger. No matter how many things on the list are crossed out, we notice what remains. During my youth, I bulldozed books — I hurried through them as though the sheer act of reading (and let’s be honest, sometimes it was scanning) a book meant that its contents and potency were lodged in my head, like Cronus swallowing all his children. How I wish. What usually happened was that I hardly recalled anything afterward besides the basic plot and a lurid detail or two, but that didn’t stop me from plowing on. I enjoyed checking books off my list too much.

If this is you too — or if this was you at any point in your life — we’re in good company. “Listmania”, as I call it, is a common phenomenon rooted in good intentions and often with happy side effects, such as eventually becoming a more mature and patient reader. But there is a melancholy side to it we can’t escape. The Italian author Umberto Eco calls it right out:

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists…

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die. ¹

Umberto Eco in his home library, bravely ready to meet death

Now, Eco is certainly not suggesting we log into our Goodreads account and delete our reading progress for the year. Or that making bucket lists of operas we want to see or South Pacific islands we want to visit is vain and frivolous. He is only gently pointing out what most of us (including me) are reluctant to see: the act of list-making is an inherently comforting activity because it distracts us from the terrible truth that there is no time to do all the things, even if we’ve managed to list all the things.

One solution might be to make our lists more modest and reasonable. Maybe it’s too grandiose to hope to visit all the sovereign nations in the world, so let’s just aim for the capital cities of Europe. Better yet, get rid of lists altogether! Who needs them anyway; aren’t we supposed to just live moment to moment? But here I think we’re rushing from one mistake to another. One of the most remarkable things about lists is that they help us expand our memory and our imagination and give us a sense of how much we’ve yet to learn — surely, that’s a good thing.

In fact, lists and other forms of record-keeping, I’d argue, aren’t even optional. They are built into our DNA. They help form our identity. We can’t confront the pitfall of list-making without appreciating the positive side first.

Lists are extensions of ourselves

In 1998, philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark published a rather provocative paper entitled “The Extended Mind.” Their argument, as the title suggests, is that physical tools — including lists — can function as parts of our thinking. There is no clear boundary between where the mind ends and the world begins. ²

I find this argument unsettling but accurate. My journals are filled with pages of thoughts, anecdotes, and sometimes entire conversations that I would never recall otherwise. Some of them are buried so deep in my subconscious that even when I read them, I have no recollection of them. It’s as though I’m reading the thoughts of a version of myself from a parallel life.

Lists, like other types of note-keeping, help organize and orient us. They are breadcrumb trails that lead us to where we (hopefully) want to go. They catch the riches that slip through our cheesecloth-like brains, especially at inconvenient hours of the night as we’re trying to fall asleep. Half or more of the essays I write are thanks to lists that allow me to pin down book titles, words, and ideas so I can later come back to them and explore them in depth. Life without lists and other external memory aids would be like living with brain damage.

German 1890s illustration, Robert Engels

I think this even includes aspirational lists of books to read and places to go. There is inherent enjoyment to be found in revisiting these ideas and images in our minds; they are a reference point that fills us with awe and reminds us just how much we haven’t yet experienced or learned.

The problem with my high school listmania was not my ambitions, but the anxiety they caused. These books were a conquest to be made, rather than something to be savored. Like Don Juan with his thousands of sex partners, I couldn’t bring myself to reread a book because I was afraid of missing out on something new. I had yet to learn what novelist Vladimir Nabokov taught his students: that to reread a book is to read it anew.

The ability to measure is part of what is so seductive about list-making: I’ve read ten out of a hundred, only ninety more to go! The problem is that lists measure only at a superficial level: I read Wuthering Heights. I visited the Gold Coast. I took a pastry-making class.

As Jerry Muller observes in his book The Tyranny of Metrics:

There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. ³

If we had a deeper way to measure, say, the knowledge and transformation that we gained from reading books, we would likely discover that it made more sense to read fewer books and reread more of them. But since we don’t have a metric for this deeper type of transformation, we substitute it with simpler ones, like list-making.

This is probably the same phenomenon you see with certain Instagrammers who rush from one scenic destination to the next, on an endless quest of “bucket lust” to check off all the places they hope to see before they die. Social media especially tends to favor what is physical and discrete over interior realities. As a result, it also fuels our anxiety about finitude and limitation. When we write down 100 books to read or 100 countries to visit on a list, there’s a sense of optimism that we will live long enough to complete all of those things. As long as we have things to do, we can’t die. We know it’s absurd logically but a part of us truly believes and hopes this.

How do we get the most from the upside of existential listmaking while keeping the anxiety at bay?

By forgetting, of course — at just the right time.

A sane life requires both remembering and forgetting

In his essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche makes the very interesting argument that too much of a preoccupation with history and comparison and pattern-making is bad for us. Cheerfulness, joyfulness, confidence in the future — all of these depend on “one’s being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember at the right time.” ⁴

The beauty of lists is that they help us remember, but as Nietzsche points out, too much remembering comes with its own downsides. It can make us neurotic, frantic, overly confident and preoccupied with understanding the impossible. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I became a more peaceful and less anxious person when I stopped making “to-do” lists of books I hoped to read, of countries I hoped to visit, of things I hoped to accomplish. There is much less of a need to impress myself and others. I feel less hurried and less afraid of missing out, less worried about getting older and more at peace with my limitations.

These days, I use lists as a tool — not to measure knowledge or wisdom, which is not truly possible — but to help me squirrel away promising resources and ideas. I allow myself to cross out or delete things that no longer seem important or relevant. I continue to let the majority of the books on my shelves sit “fallow.” I no longer use lists as a way to create ultimate meaning or organization, as tempting as that still feels. I realize there’s no final or perfect list in existence, so I don’t attempt to create one, much less check the boxes off it. In short, I use lists, I am not used by them.

It doesn’t erase my discomfort knowing that there is no time for all the things, and there never will be.

But wherever that discomforts nags at me, I can always lose myself in a good book — and forget.

1. Beyer, Susanne, and Lothar Gorris. “SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco: ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die.’” SPIEGEL International, 11 Nov. 2009. Read here.

2. Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, vol. 58, no. 1, Jan. 1998, pp. 7–19. Oxford University Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3328150

3. Muller, Jerry Z. The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton University Press, 2019.

4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1997.