Fun Things and Thieves

It's no secret that I really like making lists.

When I was in school I used to have a whiteboard hung on my bedroom wall. It was called Cartoon Network Things To Do.

These days I no longer have a whiteboard, and my lists have other names. Until yesterday, my grocery list was a handwritten page tacked to the kitchen cupboard; I would take a photo of it before going shopping. My Fun Things List (for projects I want to work on, movies to see, places to visit, and things like that) was another handwritten sheet, tacked to my clothes cupboard. My to-do list was a Google Doc.

But last week I bought a smartphone, and after trying out a number of unsatisfactory list-making apps, yesterday I found an app called Wunderlist, which is so perfectly suited to my very specific list-needs that it has revolutionised the way I make lists. Here's a photo of some of the lists on my phone.

For some time now my to-do list has been called Thieves, which is a play on words: 'chore' and চোর (Bangla for 'thief') are false friends – words in two different languages that sound the same but have different meanings. I like lists but I hate chores, and I suspect my long-running efforts to come up with amusing names for to-do lists are really only a way to make them less intimidating and more fun.

I like my Thieves list to be shorter than my Fun things list; the relative lengths of the two lists could almost be seen as a rough measure of how my life is going. Tonight, it's too close to call.