Catalogue of the different kinds of lists we compose in our day-to-day lives.

types-of-lists.md

Types of lists

Catalogue of the different kinds of lists we compose in our day-to-day lives

• Bucket list

  Such as "Things to do before you die". Typically aspirational, completeable. Manual sorting (usually importance or desired completion order).

• TODO list

  Such as "Weekend tasks to complete" or "Things to buy". Typically driven by necessary chores, completeable, and discarded upon completion. Sorted by urgency.

• Best-of list

  Such as "Top 10 movies of all time". Similar to bucket lists but retrospective. Sorted by quality.

• Inventory list

  Such as "Items for sale". Completeable. Various sorting (sometimes alphabetical, chronological, or some value metric like price).

  Content of each item stays the same but the list shrinks when items are completed or grows when items are added or uncompleted.

• Brainstorming list

  Such as this list. Fleshed out over time, occasionally deeply nested. Often used as an outline before composing a narrative document. Manual sorting (usually follows a narrative).

• Index list

  A list of lists. One to rule them all. Sorted alphabetically or chronologically.

• Check list

  Such as "Server deployment checklist". Similar to the TODO list but recurring in usage. Completeable and resettable. Manual sorting (usually follows a narrative).

  Another variation of this list is the Diagnostic list, such as the "Purity Quiz" passed around in chain letters. Similar to the Bucket list but used to categorize and classify conditions.

• Timeline list

  Such as "Books I've read". Sorted chronologically, and is append-only. Often used for keeping a log about some theme. Completed items from other lists form this kind of list.

What other kinds of lists are there?

What is a good way to distinguish different kinds of lists? Perhaps by the kind of engagement they require? For example, are they sorted/prioritized, completable, collaborative/personal/curated, time-sensitive/evergreen?

• Shopping list: built up slowly (like a todo list), completed all at once (like a check list). Also many-writer-single-reader?

@wolever As discussed in chat, shopping lists are too similar to todo lists in interface and use scenario. And many-writer-single-reader is more of a mechanism for collaboration than a type of list. :)

• Procrastination list: items that move between Todo and Today lists many times.
• LIST: List Indexing Sequence Types (i.e. https://gist.github.com/2467329)

doubly linked lists

Grocery List is a big one. Though you mentioned shopping lists, I see shopping list as a "things I want", grocery list is much more temporary/temporal.

I use iPhone Notes to make lists. I tried to force myself to try the new Reminders app, but it seems not as good for my purposes. I delete shopping lists and the like, but have kept the following lists on my phone since 2007 (date last updated):

Favorite Goldberg variations (Jun 7, 2008) [playing order]

"Baltimore Consort - Howl's Delight" (Oct 8, 2008) [single item reminding me to pick up a track I heard on the radio in my car... I still may do so]

Favorite tracks on the album, "Stylus Phantasticus" (May 29, 2011) [playing order]

My gold- and silver-rated restaurants [separated by a blank line, each with internal order] in the East bay as I discover them (Nov 26, 2011)

Trips (Mar 13, 2012) [ordered list of places to vacation in the future]

Pixar films (Mar 13, 2012) [ordered list of all Pixar films by how much I like them]

Health stats (Mar 15, 2012) [height, weight, and blood pressure measurements by person then date for myself, Adric, and Dylan]

Water log (Mar 30, 2012) [list of ppm dissolved solids readings for tap, old filter, and fresh filter in our kitchen]

Rad log (Apr 7, 2012) [list of radiation readings taken with my counter on various trips]

[inventory of clothing items needed to purchase for kids -- shopping list in progress]

The long gap between 2008 and 2011 is probably due to the fact that I was mostly using a desktop computer in 2009-2010, where I keep such lists in plain text or excel files).

Lists always have an order, even if order isn't important. But order may become important as a list grows. Conclusion: To represent unordered lists, randomize order every time list is displayed (important for surveys). User always keeps power to manage order. Auto-randomize is just one tool, along with sorting, manual ranking, and recalling the order entered.

Lists are really tables. Let me add fields by composing basic datatypes. Like, add a "date eaten" column. Imagine speeding up making a spreadsheet by a factor of 100. Common everyday list types would be defaults. Let a list be a valid list item.

Best way to share lists would be with a distributed VCS -like regime of branching and merging. glist?

@clumma Thanks for sharing your lists! I think I can extract at least one more list type from your examples—I'm thinking the 'Reference list', but I need to think about it more. Let me go through them one by one and try to categorize them into my current nomenclature (which will clearly need to evolve).

Favorite Goldberg variations (Jun 7, 2008) [playing order]

Best-of list.

"Baltimore Consort - Howl's Delight" (Oct 8, 2008) [single item reminding me to pick up a track I heard on the radio in my car... I still may do so]

TODO list (pick up these tracks...)

Favorite tracks on the album, "Stylus Phantasticus" (May 29, 2011) [playing order]

Best-of list.

My gold- and silver-rated restaurants [separated by a blank line, each with internal order] in the East bay as I discover them (Nov 26, 2011)

Best-of list.

Trips (Mar 13, 2012) [ordered list of places to vacation in the future]

Bucket list. (Because it's aspirational)

Pixar films (Mar 13, 2012) [ordered list of all Pixar films by how much I like them]

Best-of list.

Health stats (Mar 15, 2012) [height, weight, and blood pressure measurements by person then date for myself, Adric, and Dylan]

I want to say inventory list, but the use case isn't quite right because the length remains the same but the content of each item keeps getting updated, whereas inventory would have varying lengths (through completion) with the content of each present item staying the same. I also want to say reference list but I imagine reference lists being append-only versions of inventory lists. It's almost like Reference List nested in a Timeline List. Maybe we need a new kind of list type here? Or maybe just call it a Timeline list per-person, if we're tracking changes over time.

Water log (Mar 30, 2012) [list of ppm dissolved solids readings for tap, old filter, and fresh filter in our kitchen]

Reference list. [Edit: On second read, I want to say Timeline list. Perhaps the 'Reference list' is not a useful category after all.]

Rad log (Apr 7, 2012) [list of radiation readings taken with my counter on various trips]

Another interesting one. I want to say Timeline List but geographically-focused instead of temporally.

[inventory of clothing items needed to purchase for kids -- shopping list in progress]

TODO list.

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What do you think? I'm open to tweaking the names and definitions of my lists to accomodate these classifications, but I feel the breakdown is appropriate.

Lists always have an order, even if order isn't important. But order may become important as a list grows. Conclusion: To represent unordered lists, randomize order every time list is displayed (important for surveys).

I agree with the premise but disagree with the conclusion. I agree it's important for surveys, but for casual list-sharing, randomized ordering is a poor user experience. "Hey Denali, check out #11 on Carl's list of favorite people!"

Lists are really tables. Let me add fields by composing basic datatypes.

True but I'd argue that's an excessive generalization. Taken to an extreme, everything is an n-dimensional table. Let's say that for this exercise, we'll focus on 2-dimensional tables with fixed column sets depending on the list type.

Best way to share lists would be with a distributed VCS -like regime of branching and merging. glist?

This is partly what I have in mind. I definitely want a culture of list-forking ("That list of Favorite Movies close, but clearly wrong. Here, I'll make my own version."). As for merging, I'm thinking more of a Quora-style "Suggest an edit/addition" feature instead of outright merging. Ultimately I'd want to see an "averaged out" version of all forked Favorite Movies lists.

@shazow Sorry for the delayed response. I do tend to excessive generalization. I think your categories are pretty good. Favorite Goldbergs looks like this:

Goldbergs:

1 (Aria)
3 5
11 13 15
22 23 24
27 29 30
31 (Quodlibet)

The title in Apple Notes is therefore, "Goldbergs:". They're track numbers in order, with large gaps between favorites shown with a line break. So using the 2-D structure of the text file expressively in an unstructured way. Not terribly important here, but I do like that flexibility sometimes.

Health stats really is (or should be) a table. Ditto rad log, which has a location, date, dose rate, and dose type on each line, separated with dashes.

That's all that comes to mind. I don't have any conclusions. I like the idea of an averaged-out merged favorites list.

@clumma Have you considered using a Google Docs^WDrive spreadsheet for your health stats etc? Specifically if you use the 'Make a form' feature, it's really great for mobile input. And the spreadsheet itself is pretty decent for readonly mobile consumption. That's what I've been using for tracking my workouts and such.

Perhaps these tables don't fall into the world of "list" as we defined it here.

What's WDrive? I'm trying the normal mobile google docs spreadsheet in safari now, and it's being too fussy for my taste. (I'm asked to pick a title before getting started, lots of controls filling the screen, zooming in and out to get into fields, the widgets aren't high-res, and so on.)

^W is used to delete the previous word on Unixy terminals. So I meant to say Google DocsDrive.

I mean, you need to setup the spreadsheet on a desktop, with all the columns you want and whatnot. Then go to Tools -> Create Form, make a form, and mail yourself the link so you can bookmark it on your mobile device and use that for data entry.

Also reading a spreadsheet on mobile after it has already been created is not too bad.

Aha, that's worth a try. I have an Excel version of the rad log already.