Why I Am Anti-List or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Vacations
I hate lists. I’m talking about the list that fits the mold of “92 YouTube videos to get you through an entire work day without accomplishing anything.” A quick glance at my Twitter feed shows three of these monstrosities, including “220 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website & Increase Your Business,” “30 pianos around London for impromptu singalongs” and “40 Great Adobe AIR Applications for Designers and Developers.” Lists are the blogger’s quick substitute for creativity. They undermine the whole point of learning and they destroy family vacations. In that order.
There’s no blogging without a degree of hypocrisy and so I’ll openly admit that I wrote a list once and posted it on another blog I write for (the post was a list of blogging tips). I was lazy and needed to pump something out on a time crunch. The list didn’t have any credibility to it. I had never even tried a couple of the things I was suggesting. It was pointless and idiotic. And then the post got a bunch of pageviews – more than a slew of other posts that I considered more substantive. And because of that, I felt pointless and idiotic. I feel a sense of pity and maybe loathing for a generation of web users (myself included) that cannot identify the difference between quality and crap online, choosing to associate/confuse quality with lists, how-tos, and all the templated garbage that people can spit out without an ounce of thought or research.
Do you really read a list as if you’re trying to memorize it or learn from it? Like with most content online, we’ve learned to scroll the text with our eyes. The brain’s doing nothing with the message. The synapses don’t even have to fire, it’s that worthless.
Lists are a distraction. The writers are merely banking on the fact that your desire for entertainment will trump your desire to learn. I would take a two-item list with enough substance for me to actually learn something over any half-baked list that proves only that the writer can count past the number 20.
Lists have one redeeming factor. They provided me with the contrast needed to enjoy great vacations today. Let me explain.
Lists turned my childhood family vacations into multi-day exercises in impatience and downright malice. My mom has many virtues, but one paradigm she lived by was the need to “check things off the list.” Our family vacations were always structured that way. Mom knew what “tourists see” in any give place and that became her list. (By the way, don’t ever plan a trip in such a way that your kids conclude that your tastes and preferences are just a carbon copy of TripAdvisor). Our vacation schedule would become so tightly packed with checklist items that she would forget to factor in meals, delays, and fatigue. That is not a vacation. That is a recipe for disaster.
Today, I love to travel. In my married life, I’ve learned how to vacation enjoyably merely by looking at what my family did and doing it differently. I’ll write more about this later. In essence, my vacations have a higher ratio of “exploration time” (with a lower ratio of checklist items). I owe that to lists.
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Tagged as: Blogging · lists · nightmare family vacations
Interesting thoughts Scott, but I don’t know if I entirely agree.
The real value lists provide is the ability for readers to get information quickly. With all of today’s tweeting and status updates and stumbling, there is hardly any time in the day to sit and read out “40 different ways to tip the scale.”
It’s not about creativity, or the lack thereof, as much as it is about giving readers what they want, as fast as possible.
The list approach works for some ideas, but not for others. My “45 Rules of Great Logo Design” (Google it if you’re interested), for example, works great as a list. There’s no other way I’d rather do it. Having a list of “400 people you need to follow on Twitter”, however, kind of defeats the purpose behind the list.
It’s definitely interesting to think about though.
“It’s not about creativity, or the lack thereof, as much as it is about giving readers what they want, as fast as possible.”
You’ve got several good points, Tanner. If I’m a blogger and I want to change my readers’ lives, do I want to give them what they want, as fast as possible? It certainly sounds good, and as a writer I’d like to think that’s one of the things I’ll accomplish. I do think it’s important to take an additional step back, and ask, “Is this really going to be the most valuable thing I can do for them?” I don’t just want to give to my readers. I want to lead them to change the way they perceive and consume content. In a perfect world, we’d evaluate all content equally, whether it be “5 Things” or five paragraphs. The pendulum has tipped too far to the side of lists, which is really what prompted the post. Great feedback.
Some great thoughts.
If you want to give your readers the best value for their time then you’ll have to spend a lot of your own time deciding what needs to go into a blog post and what you can afford to cut out.
You’ve given me a lot to think about, thanks Scott!