More To Do Than Can Ever Be Listed

From a line credited to Mark Twain, though nobody has found him writing it: eat a live frog first thing, and nothing worse can happen all day. Brian Tracy's method: do the ugliest task first, before email and easy wins, while attention is fresh.

A chapter of Willpower tracing the to-do list from Genesis, a world made in a six-step plan, through Benjamin Franklin's virtues, to a comedian chasing productivity. A list can bring our highest happiness or our dreariest dissatisfaction, depending on how it is built.

Benjamin Franklin listed virtues with a goal for each, like Order: 'let each part of your business have its time.' The goals fought. His schedule broke when a client came, because Industry said to meet them, and Frugality ate Industry's hours. Clashing goals bring unhappiness, not action.

At the Pentagon, generals were asked for their strategy in 25 words. Only one answered: the one woman in the room. 'First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three. Then I cross out everything from three down.' Blunt, but it reconciles the long term with the short.

The comedian Drew Carey gave his to-do list to David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. Allen taught him to write specific next steps, not big goals. 'Sort out my career' cannot be done today, so it nags like a mother until one small, doable step is taken.

A waiter remembered unpaid orders and forgot them once paid. Bluma Zeigarnik tested it: interrupted tasks are remembered better. That memory claim replicates poorly. What holds up is the Ovsiankina effect, named for Maria Ovsiankina: the urge to go back and finish.

An unfinished goal breaks into other work as intrusive thoughts. But researchers found that making a specific plan for it stops the interference, even before the task is done. The mind wants a plan, with a time and a place, not a finished task. 'Score 1 for to-do lists.'

The same pull works against procrastination. Take a first step, however small, and the project becomes an interrupted task, whose tension pulls you back. A project at zero has no pull. So leave zero cheaply: one sentence, one sum, one opened file.

Juggling tasks leaves several open at once, and each sends intrusive thoughts into the others, so all of them finish later. Doing them one at a time clears space for the next. Memory research gives the reason for an old list rule: don't start the second until the first is done.

In Book 2 of the Iliad, Homer stops the war to list the Greek forces for about 350 lines, a stretch readers skip. It is Eco's chief poetic list: its job is magnitude, not information, making an army feel countless by starting to count it. Homer says no others came, so the count is closed.

In the Iliad the god Hephaestus makes Achilles a shield holding the whole cosmos, from the stars to the sheep in the fields. Eco calls it 'finite form': a closed world with nothing outside and no room to add. Beside the open Catalogue of Ships, Eco prefers the boundless list.

Eco finds the poetic list beyond words. A painted list, a still life or a massacre, implies more beyond the frame. Music too: Ravel's Boléro repeats one melody, only growing louder, and could go on for ever. Sculpture defeats him: a statue cannot say 'et cetera'.

The worry about Eco's love of lists: lists also order, control and exclude. Many scholars see them as a by-product of writing. Only when a culture can list its kings can it fix one view of its history. The lists of places Eco loves in James Joyce also built imperial control.