I’ve Made A Little List

“Lists are a marvellous thing, they’re incredibly useful and many people just love doing them.There are of course also people who live their lives in blissful ignorance about the benefits of list making, and sometimes we list-people envy them. How do they do their shopping without writing down everything they’ll need to buy (and then forget half of it because we left the list on the kitchen counter?) How do they stay organised without an itemised account of the content of their garage? I mean…. they just remember stuff?

But lists are not just useful, they can be great fun, too! Just think of all the lists in circulation that summarise your 10 favourite cars (which funnily match the 10 favourite cars of Top Gear Magazine, but that’s just a coincidence and testimony of your good judgement) or the 99 must-see movies of the 80s. Last but not least, there’s the king of all lists, the famous ‘bucket list’. All the things I’d just must do before I die – and would be doing if I wouldn’t be busy writing lists. Which reminds me of a fellow yacht designer who had a very organised approach to managing all his tasks: On Monday morning he sat down at his desk and started writing his to-do list for the week to follow. And on Friday he usually finished doing the list… but then there wasn’t much week left.

Don’t get me wrong, I do my to-do lists, too. But I do them on the go and I try my best to keep them short, trying to tick off as quick as I can add. Admittedly, it doesn’t always work, because a creative mind is very good in creating tasks!”

One more thing about to-do lists (or rather their very useful electronic counterpart, the to-do app): Most to-do applications are either very simple ‘shopping lists’ or complex project management systems with integrated functions for delegating tasks, communication between team members and, most important, deadlines! Which of course, is a good thing, but not always applicable. We have developed the concept for a contextual to-do app, which takes into account that not all tasks can be seen in isolation but depend on ticking off other tasks first.. if you’re an app developer, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

Last but not least, let us rant about about the lists that annoy us most (and they seem to be very popular on social networks such as Facebook): I’m talking about those lists writing by very smart (but unfortunately pretty arrogant) people who luckily know more about Italian food (seriously, Pizza Hawaii is not an old Neapolitan classic?) or what upsets Brazilians (can you believe they get annoyed when people think there are monkeys running in the streets?) than the rest of us and what to point out that embarrassing lack of knowledge to us. Come to think about it, I really should put together a list of things people say that annoy yacht designers…