Lists Galore

I’ve made my love of Ama­zon’s wish lists no secret. Heck, I’d like it just because it’s a list and I’m all about mak­ing lists. How­ev­er, this is a great life­hack (to use a buzz­word), too: use a wish list not for net­ting gifts (although you can always buy me some­thing if the mood strikes), but rather as a list of you back to-be-pur­chased cat­a­log. This is hard­ly a con­cept I’m new to. I’ve had an Excel spread­sheet titled Items to Acquire for about sev­en years now which includes all sorts of dif­fer­ent things that I’d like to spend my mon­ey on when some extra comes around. Movies, books, sport­ing equip­ment, gad­gets, albums, etc. You see, sad­ly, I’m the kind of per­son who draws a men­tal blank when mon­ey is avail­able for that sort of thing and ends up buy­ing the bright-shiny’s inside the store I’m at. Hard­ly being a smart consumer.

Enter my list. Noth­ing’s more sat­is­fy­ing to us OCD-types than cross­ing an item off of our lists. We even do it with rulers on graph paper for added joy. Okay, I actu­al­ly just use the strikethrough for­mat in Excel, but what­ev­er. It’s still sat­is­fy­ing. I’ve resist­ed putting all this into my Ama­zon wish­list since it’d just all get dumped into one big long, unwieldy list. I’d be just as over­whelmed with choic­es as is I was star­ing at rows of shelves and end up run­ning; drop­ping my $20 on a shiny bauble on the way out the door, no doubt.

No, Ama­zon has kind­ly added the abil­i­ty to use mul­ti­ple lists under you account. (Okay, this may have been around since over the sum­mer, but I’m just now fig­ur­ing it out. That hap­pens. A lot.) I can now have a wish list titled Book­shelf for all my movies, books, and albums (although music most­ly comes from iTunes Music Store these days, due to the instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion fac­tor). I can also sep­a­rate out my tech­ni­cal books for work in a list titled Engi­neer­ing. I can have one for Soft­ware and for even Gift Ideas. These lists can be anno­tat­ed, ranked, and sort­ed to my lik­ing. Sure, Ama­zon does­n’t car­ry every­thing that I might want to put on a list like this, but it goes a long way. It sure does help me from buy­ing anoth­er lemon like The Best Of James. Now, the next step is to make sure that the list is with me when I’m out and about.

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Categorized as Life

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

2 comments

  1. Just know that if you move some­thing from one list to anoth­er, it los­es any rat­ing and descrip­tion you’ve put on it. Well, at least that’s what it did when I moved all my Web stuff into a sep­a­rate list. That was when the fea­ture just came out. They could have fixed it by now.

  2. Yes, that appears to be the case, since the com­ments and rat­ings on all of my Engi­neer­ing books were removed. No big loss, but that is def­i­nite­ly some­thing that should be corrected.

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