To Do Lists by Sacha Craddock

1. It is important to notate it all. 

2.    How else to keep track of the range of the chores, considerations, responsibilities; the essential and mildly inessential things that need to be done, said, written, given, bought, conveyed, found and posted. 

3.    The process of writing a list can subdue a sense of panic and temporarily transfer pressure elsewhere. 

4.    The layout of such an unselfconscious combination of writing and drawing will always unite us with the visual. 

5.    It is guaranteed to serve some function, even when what needs to be done is not done. 

6.    The list is a mental x ray of everyday life and represents thought at a given time. 

7.    Laid open, written or scrawled, lightly and heavily placed across the page, in a corner, on a scrap, strip, or notebook, even typed into a mobile, it is as much about knowing as seeing. 

8.    With pen, pencil, marker or sticker, is one of the last places where hand and mind combine as people seldom write now. 

9.    Even when all is ticked or crossed off, which almost never happens, it stays around to represent an ambitious and perhaps temporarily clear state of mind. 

10.    Men make lists too, of course, but the women’s list, reflects the special, distinct and pressing range of her responsibility and exposes the amazingly unequal distribution of labour in reality. 

11.    An accompanying visible friend, it reflects a massively divergent range of concern, from teeth to war, supper to someone else. Social, maternal, educational, and financial matters are written down as if of equal importance. 

12.    The domestic, dutiful and often dull, there along with the highest ambition; the formal and physical merges with the personal and political. 

13. It represents what, and who, we think about and is made up of real as well as false dreams. Unresolved items will return. 

14.    It is not made with an eye to publication but lies around at home and work. It is private, and has little meaning for others. 

15.    Essential but slight, a vehicle for thought, for action, it is a skeleton of meaning and a structural aid for life.