This is a post about New Year’s resolutions. But I missed the yearly time window for writing about resolutions while I was acting on my other resolution of starting this blog, so please join me in pretending that it’s not about those.1


I’m a list maker at heart. These are just some of the lists in my life that come to mind:

Consider this post to be my own personal intervention. The institution of Lists has gotten out of hand in my life.

When I sit down to watch a movie, I defer to the list instead of thinking about what piques my interest that day. If I spend all of my time going through the list of work links, I’ll never get my actual work done. My list of books to read has grown beyond a decade’s worth of reading, even at a pace quicker than I’ve ever gone through books. If I buy all the things that I’ve ever thought I wanted, I’ll empty my bank account.

I must admit, however, that the title of this post is an exaggeration. I love lists, and even after today, I’ll almost certainly be using a lot of the ones above. Humans are pattern recognizers after all, and it’s super helpful to store examples of a pattern (say, recipes I know I like) in the same place outside of my memory.5 Writing down the groceries that I need as I think of them throughout the week is almost universally a better system than going to the store, trying to remember the things I need while wandering the aisles, and having to go back to the store when I inevitably forget to grab milk.

So perhaps not Against Lists, but Towards Better Lists:

Wish me luck!


  1. As a base level of pretending, the word “resolution” does not appear in the rest of the text. ↩︎

  2. An attempt to simplify all these spreadsheets, though I’m falling into the problem of proliferating standards↩︎

  3. Ground coriander has been on this list for over a month. ↩︎

  4. My friend named my cat Mao; long may he live. ↩︎

  5. Wikipedia informs me that other animals also recognize patterns. The hunt for a precise definition of the human condition goes on. ↩︎

  6. False negatives and false positives of the lists, in a manner of thinking. ↩︎