From grocery shopping to music-streaming charts, many aspects of everyday life require a list. For thousands of years, people have been carving them into stone, then scribbling them into notebooks and now tapping them into smartphones. But what is it about lists that makes them so effective and appealing?
Patterns and organisation
Lists bring a sense of order to a sometimes chaotic world. Think of the huge amount of facts and figures that the average person digests each day, not to mention the plans, experiences and exchanges that jostle for space in the brain.
In order to cope with this incredible amount of data, humans rely on something that psychologists call ‘categorisation’. This means that, without even knowing it, people mentally group similar things together very quickly.
Babies as young as three months display basic categorising behaviours (think of how toddlers group things like animals and vehicles). Lists are the outward expression of that natural tendency to find links, patterns and classifications. They’re appealing because they mirror the sorts of processes that go on inside the mind. Without them, life would be overwhelming.
Memory aide
As well as pleasing the category-loving parts of the brain, lists are handy for short-term memory, too.
There’s still a lot to be discovered about how memory works, but scientists generally agree that it favours structure. When information is presented in punchy bullet points, for example, it’s easier to recall than when it’s described in wordy paragraphs.
There’s been loads of research conducted into how and why some things stick in the brain more than others, but if you’re working on a list you want to remember, there are two findings worth considering.
The first is from 1956, when US cognitive scientist George Miller discovered that the short-term memory was able to hold onto seven (plus or minus two) bite-sized chunks of information. So, keep it short and snappy.
Then, in the 1960s, several psychologists established that people tend to remember the first and last pieces of information presented to them better than the elements in the middle. So, if there’s anything crucial being added to a list, make sure it gets one of those prime positions.
Make any list stick by adapting it to suit you – for example, colour-code it for visual learners, or read it aloud for auditory learners.
Fast facts
Lists also manage to convey a surprisingly full picture in a way that’s quick to absorb – if something’s at the top of a list, it’s probably the best, the highest or the most important. Items lower down a list are likely to be ‘lesser’. Knowing where an item sits in a list gives it context.
For example, according to the World Population Review, these are the most populated cities in the world:
- Tokyo
- Delhi
- Shanghai
Without knowing exact numbers, you get a sense that all three cities are densely populated but that Delhi is home to fewer people than Tokyo and more than Shanghai.
Listing is also a fab way of dumping tons of ideas onto a page in the shortest form possible. To-do lists are a great example of this. Love or hate them, they’re quick to create, focus the mind and are satisfying to work through.
Of course, not everything suits a list, and it’s important not to get hung up or anxious about ticking things off – there should always be room for adjustments and surprises – but, in moderation, they’re effective and fun.
Roll call of rewards
Here’s a handy reminder of some of the ways that lists can be helpful (in list form, of course)
- They relieve anxiety by establishing a sense control.
- They get a lot of information across quickly by providing context.
- They appeal to the short-term memory by breaking information into bite-sized bits.
- They act as a plan, which in itself can be a good, morale-boosting stressbuster.
- Items that have been ticked off a to-do list become a ‘done’ list.