2 ways to rethink list making

As a compiler and curator of lists, I think they do seem to be more central to our lives than ever before. If I'm not creating my obsessive to-do list, then it's a list of books to read, letters to write, or drawers to organize.

Here are two lessons to think about when assembling your own lists or examining those of others:

• Reconsider the vertical: Given that few of us think in rigid sequence, why do we inevitably start lists at the upper left-hand corner of a piece of paper and continue down in a neat, linear cascade? Varying the format can make a list far more useful. Start in the center of a page and write items in spatial relation to one another so that you create clouds of related tasks; draw a Venn diagram for party invitees so you can note how people will interact.

• Avoid the trap of 10: Just because 10s can be ticked off on one's gingers and toes does not mean that long lists should be artificially compressed to a decade, nor short lists padded out to reach this symbolic number. In Biblical hermeneutics, the number 10 represents the perfection and completeness of the divine order--as in the Ten Commandments.

--Ben Schott, the British author of Schott's Orignial Miscellany