The list is a “simple machine” that people use in all sorts of ways. When you start thinking of three or more items, I encourage you to start writing down a list. This way you’re less likely to forget any of them. You’re giving yourself the chance to time shift, by separating the mental effort of making the list with the doing part. Time shifting is a super power that only Humans have evolved. You might as well make use of it!
A lot of opportunities open up, once you have a list. You can think about your list in order of priority. You could line them up by their dependency on each other. You can shorten the list to just the fewest you need. A list can become a to do list if you mark off items as you accomplish them. You can treat a list like a queue if you add new items to the bottom of the list and work them starting from the top. A successful list can be re-used as a recipe for repeating the same work.
In a programming context having a list can simplify a lot of algorithms. It can also speed things up in long running data interactions. Rather than complete an entire task at once for all the items, you can instead begin by just making a list of the items that need to be processed. Now you can batch them into smaller chunks. You can process the batches, perhaps even one at a time, with less processing power than it’d take to do the entire bulk of them at once. You can monitor the progress by counting the number of completed items. You can spread out the processing over time, so resource allocation doesn’t spike quite so high. You can interleave batches of one job with batches of another job, so neither job finishes as fast as it would on its own, but both finish in a more predictable and smooth amount of time. You can pause and pick back up if you need to stop processing.
The benefits of getting the work into a list before you begin are worth considering.
John DeHope 