The Master List.

This is continuing on from the last blog post, “The List, v1.0“, in order to provide some historical insight into how the current iteration of “The List” came to be.

At this point in the story, whenever I have tried to explain how “The List” currently works, a lot of people have reacted with disbelief, and many have told me that this is taking a good idea too far. Bear with me though, as I try to have this make sense to you.

When we last left off, The List v1.0 was in full implementation. It split the TV shows I was watching into seasons and gave me an order (the Rotation) in which to watch them. It let ongoing shows “cut in line” and jump back into the Rotation if a new episode or season came out. It ordered shows on Standby so that they were ready to replace Rotation shows which were completed on a moment’s notice. It split shows between “live action” and “animation” and forced me to watch both kinds evenly, alternating between them.

I used this form of “The List” for a long time. Changes were made to keep it interesting, such as the creation of an archive of completed shows (storing the name and date of completion of each one) and the systematic randomising of the order in which shows were pulled from Standby into the Rotation (by assigning a number to each show and using random.org to select one). I began to let people know that their latest show recommendation would need to wait, typically due to a lack of space in Standby, and that even shows on Standby had no guarantee of ever being watched due to the randomness involved in choosing the next show to jump to Rotation – much to the frustration of some of my close friends (and to my secret amusement).

The List v1.0 had a way of making me feel productive while entertaining myself. Moving a completed show from Rotation to the Archive, and then randomly selecting what would come next from up to 10 possible shows on Standby (per category, remember) was strangely exciting. It felt fulfilling to see the Archive grow and you never really knew what show you would need to work through next. While it definitely made me enjoy watching TV shows a lot more, most likely because it sort of ‘gamified’ the process, there was one issue which I could not see clearly at the time.

See, the problem I have with using lists, in general, is that I will tend to stick to the list. If I go shopping with a list, I will be very effective, in-and-out, grab all the items and head straight home, listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast all the way to keep me entertained and focused; this is generally OK, except where there is a problem with the list I am using. Maybe I didn’t write down everything we need at home. Maybe there is something that would come in handy and that I might otherwise consider grabbing if I saw it in the store; if it’s not on the list, odds are I won’t even think of it. The same thing happens if I make a list of stuff to bring with me when I pack for a trip – anything that I might accidentally leave off the list is extremely likely to be left behind.

What I mean by this is that, for people like me, if you are going to use a list, you’d better make sure that the list is inclusive enough to meet the goals you want to achieve with it, because it is hard to think outside of it once you get going. Lists remove the need to constantly think about what you are doing while you are doing it, which is good for effectiveness, but bad for adaptability.

The problem I had with The List v1.0 was that I was basically only watching TV shows in my free time. Whenever I even thought of doing something else (which was rare), like play a video game or read a book, my initial thought was that it would be time less well spent than simply progressing with the next show in Rotation. I wasn’t going to get a nice little entry in the Archive for having completed Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, after all (still did though, great game, 10/10 would play again). This began to feel very limiting after a while, and so I decided to change the incentives by expanding my system.

Enter the Master List.

The premise of the Master List was simple: take the system developed for TV shows, and find a way to implement it for other forms of entertainment that you want to consume more of:

1. Films;
2. Music;
3. Books;
4. Video games.

Initially, the idea was that I would use the same format for all of these forms of entertainment as I had done with TV shows; however, it simply did not work. For example, films are mostly self-contained: you watch one and it is completed, so there is no need for a Rotation which forces you to skip between different films – rather, all you need is a list of films which you can choose randomly from, with safeguards to ensure that you don’t watch related films out of order (e.g., that you don’t watch Return of the Jedi before A New Hope). Video games required me to plan ahead, because some games would be available to me in Lisbon, while others only at my parents’ house in Covilhã. Swapping out between books also didn’t work very well, even if I chose the end of a chapter as a cut-off point, as I found myself frequently lost if I came back to a book left on hold for a (sometimes long) while, especially for fiction – it was best for me to just read through it all.

I won’t discuss what the structure for each “sub-list” covering one of these types of entertainment became here yet. These structures remain mostly unchanged from their initial version in the Master List to this day, and will be covered when we get to the end, and start discussing the current version of “The List“. The point here is to remember that, at this stage, I was doing this all on Notepad still.

As I mentioned before, I love Notepad, and was more than content to use it for The List v1.0. It worked, it was quick and easy to update and it seemed more… “retro” than using something which might be more appropriate, such as Excel. However, I never found a good way to fit in more than one sub-list (for instance, the sub-list for TV shows and the sub-list for films) in the same Notepad file. As such, for a (very short) while, I used 6 different Notepad files, one for each sub-list (and one for the Archive, which expanded from just TV shows to become “global”).

In order to meet my goal, I needed each sub-list to rotate with the others, so that I would be required to spread my experiences out between all of the 5 forms of entertainment. This created a Supra-Rotation, where each of the 5 sub-lists was in a certain order, and the sub-list in the first slot would move to the end of the order once a certain trigger was activated. These were:

• TV Shows: Finish a season of a show.
• Films: Finish a film.
• Music: Listen through an album.
• Books: Finish a book.
• Video Games: Beat the single-player version of a game (meaning reach the end-credits, not 100% completion).

There were some caveats to the Supra-Rotation. First off, the Ongoing rule for TV Shows still took some precedence over the whole Master List – if a new episode came out for an ongoing show, that episode would be watched even if the Books sub-list was at the top of the Supra-Rotation, for example. Second, the Supra-Rotation was not unbreakable – if Video Games were at the top, and I were in a situation where I would not be able to play any video games, I could move to the next available form of entertainment, following the Supra-Rotation’s order (I could not do this freely; only where the proper form of entertainment was truly unavailable). Thirdly, if, in a situation such as described in the second rule, a trigger event for a sub-list which was not at the top of the Supra-Rotation was met, that sub-list would still jump right to the bottom of the Supra-Rotation.

Very quickly I realised that it would be hard to manage a Supra-Rotation using 6 Notepad files – the only way which worked somewhat was to number the files and then manually change their numbering every time a change to the Supra-Rotation was needed (which was just about as fun as it sounds). Thankfully, I ran into a program called XMind, which is essentially a rather intuitive mind-mapping software. With some work, I was able to transfer all of the contents for each sub-list into a large mind map, with a central node connected to by 5 different branches (one for each sub-list), which I could reorder by simply dragging them around in the mind map, as well as the Archive (which would float around next to the central node). There was no longer any need for my trusty Notepad files, which very quickly became outdated and, eventually, were deleted.

I thought I had found the perfect system. I can’t remember exactly when I started using XMind, but the last reference I could find of it when scanning through my Messenger history was on 21 December 2017 (my brother was strongly recommending a TV show to me and a friend, and I was patiently explaining to him that there was no way I could watch it because all of the Standby slots were full, obviously). That date gives me an estimated 10 years of List usage (counting from the very first days of the Pre-List), between the early Notepad days and XMind – 10 whole years of structuring the way in which I watched TV shows, and then films, music, books and video games, all the while archiving every single work I was able to complete.

That is, until the day when I woke up to find that my XMind file had been irreversibly and fully corrupted.

~SoniChaos

• Currently playing:
  • Dragon Ball FighterZ (Playstation 4)
  • Pokémon Sapphire Version (Game Boy Advance)
• Currently reading:
  • Tratado de Direito Civil Português – Parte Geral (I) – Tomo III – Pessoas, António Menezes Cordeiro
• Currently watching:
  • Fullmetal Alchemist (Ep. 3)
  • Boruto: Naruto Next Generations (Ep. 94)
  • One Piece (Ep. 871)