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.
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.
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.