5 Things Medium’s New List Feature Did For Me

Overall, it’s a slam dunk for Medium writers

Thanks to Anu Anniah and Celine Lai I had been made aware of Medium’s new “Lists” feature before Medium even made us aware of it.

Since reading both of their articles I began the arduous task of backtracking two and a half years to create my lists. When I say arduous, believe it. When you have a back-catalog of nearly 400 stories, it takes a full day to scroll through story titles and choose which lists to add them to.

What I found is that the farther back I went, the slower and clunkier Medium became. It was painful by the time I reached the bottom third of my articles.

I’d hate to be a writer who has thousands of stories.

During my organize-a-thon I discovered several reasons why creating lists are beneficial. Here they are in no particular order.

Lists soothe my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

I’m an old school blogger. I need categories and coordination to put my mind at ease. I need something methodical!

Medium has always felt like a giant menagerie of randomness to me, almost like taking a paintbrush full of paint, splattering it against a wall, and hoping for the best.

Lists helped me remember who I used to be.

In the past year I feel like I’ve over-saturated myself in the death and grief genres but cycling back through 400 stories allowed me to remember I had a life before this.

I had actual human relationships. I traveled. I used to be funny. I used to be inspired. I can hopefully still be that person again someday.

Creating lists helped me see how badly I sucked.

For many months in my beginnings on Medium I used improper title formatting. Of course this has created an extra and very time consuming job for me because now I’ll need to edit each story with proper titles.

I’ll get around to that someday.

Lists helped me recall and highlight my heavy hitters.

I had forgotten all but my most recent heavy hitters. Creating a list called Best Performance Awards allowed me to immediately recall and keep record of my wins and successes.

Many of my stories over the years have performed beyond expectation. Now I’ve got them all neatly catalogued in one spot.

Lists helped me realize that longevity is KEY!

I am a writer who was lucky enough to be curated fairly regularly right out of the gate. But back when I had no audience curation didn’t matter much because no one knew who I was.

Longevity and participation in the community matters significantly.

By cycling back through every single story I found ones that if I were to publish them fresh today, they would undoubtedly do far better than they did back then. Because I didn’t have you all back then.

So there you have it. If you’ve considered tackling the new list function it’s totally worth it but consider yourself warned. If you have hundreds of stories, set aside a whole day. It’s time consuming.

And if you’re interested in seeing how I categorized my lists, you can check it out here.

Note to Medium HQ:

If you’re reading this, PLEASE add a function that allows us to reorder our list categories!!