I love lists, I always have; I probably always will. I wonder, however, if my incessant interest in the concise compilation of information has stunted me. The more I look at my Firefox bookmarks, the more I realize that my favorite sites allow me to list various types of things. Facebook now allows me to list and group my friends. IMDb allows me to catalog movies by director, genre, or guilty pleasure. Goodreads helps me remember what books I've read and shows me what my friends have read. Most obviously, my newfound favorite of RSS feeds plays into my predilection for reading bullet points. Rather than feeling more in-the-know and worldly, the mounds of lists I have read or made ultimately make me feel overwhelmed and underachieving.
What is overwhelming is the amount of material that exists in the world. You can't help the comparisons to your own edited lists and see how highly deficient you are in the grand scheme of things. I don't mean deficient in comparison to others, just deficient in respect to time. Lists will continue to expand and there is no way to catch up to everything, so there comes a point when you choose between knowing a little about a lot, or a lot about a little. It's disheartening that we can't have it all, but the comfort lies in that it's a fact true for everyone.
When I googled "pyschology of list making", I found many articles pertaining to decision making. In Psychology Today they state that, "Listing your resolutions can help you figure out what you really want to do with your time." Ultimately, I suppose, I like lists for a ready-made (conventional) checklist for self-improvement. But in and of itself, lists are just that. I like a list of books that have won the Noble Prize just as much as a list of albums that will be released next week. But passively reading a list is much different than actively checking off boxes, so I guess my main task is the same as most: stop procrastinating.
