When Alexa isn’t laughing at you mysteriously, chances are she, much like Siri and the rest of the Virtual Assistant family, is keeping track of your appointments and reminders, an endless ensemble of deadlines, holidays, birthdays and far too many cancelled meetings. And when I say ‘endless’, I mean it – I once discovered that the Calendar app on iOS lets you scroll far into the future, seemingly without limit. I now know that my 500th birthday will be on a Sunday, so that’s a lie-in to look forward to.
After scheduling all your important restaurant dates and morning alarms, you might hop on whatever social media you like and spend a minute (or two…hundred) scrolling down a list of posts from people you knew back in high school, perhaps putting on a playlist for background noise. Whenever you finally get up to study or work, I bet that there’ll be a list of reading or revision notes somewhere in there, and there’s no end of Internet articles shouting at you to use lists to get more done. Living these days is like trying to watch television whilst somebody tidies up and organises the room around you, incessantly dusting and adjusting. No wonder Alexa’s laughing at us.
Having made light of lists a little, you might think I don’t like them, which isn’t the case at all. I use them myself, on my devices and hand-written in a notebook too. Ticking things off feels great (tapping them in iOS isn’t quite as satisfying unfortunately), and it’s an effective visual representation of your progress on whatever you’re listing. Lists also work well in the algorithms that govern apps, bringing us helpful mechanics such as Reminders, Email Inbox folders and that lovely Shuffle Playlist function. Lists help break tasks down into easily-digestible chunks, whilst also streamlining your relaxation – everything seems more efficient when it’s ordered.
What lists can also do, however, is show you the scale of a task, as well as the complexities of each part. ‘Write essay’ is a nice bullet point, but we know there’s more to that than the brief title indicates. They can also make you feel committed to whatever path they set out, which is good with a shopping list but not so much with an event you have to cancel or an essay you have to write. Lists lock you into a course of action, which is great until you have to change that course.
Perhaps this reluctance to deviate from a list is why so many of us are still social media friends with people we haven’t seen or spoken to in years. We see breaking away from a list as a bad thing only done by those who are unorganised or easily misled, meaning we get stuck in worse habits down the line, such as liking the holiday pictures of people we don’t even recognise anymore, or endlessly skipping certain songs we don’t like anymore but still keep on our go-to playlist (I see you, pop-punk). The reason listing works so well is because it gets you into a habit, but what happens when you don’t want to have that habit anymore? After all, not all regularity is good.
With so much scrolling and swiping going on every day, it can be easy to fall into the rabbit hole of a bad habit. In fact, apps these days are designed to incorporate more scrolling because of how addictive it is. More things demand your attention than ever before, so it’s well worth your while to exercise a bit of flexibility and willpower to make sure everything you’re seeing is something you want to see, and that everything you’re doing is something you want to do. And with the way social media and similar apps work these days, refining what you interact with may mean what new stuff these apps recommend to you might actually be something you could become interested in for a change, and not a link to a slightly dodgy online store (we can dream).