The Power of Medium’s Lists Feature

Summary

The article discusses the utility and benefits of Medium's lists feature for organizing and showcasing a writer's work for readers.

Abstract

The author reminisces about the use of shopping lists in their childhood, drawing a parallel to the effectiveness of Medium's lists feature in organizing stories and poems. This feature allows writers to categorize their content by themes, facilitating easier discovery and sustained readership of older pieces. The author emphasizes the personal and communal benefits of lists, such as enabling writers to curate their work like an art gallery and providing a space for reader interactions. The article also provides practical advice on creating and maintaining lists, highlighting the ability to add descriptions and automatically update list content, which contributes to a more engaging and organized reading experience on Medium.

Opinions

The author believes that organizing stories into lists makes older content more accessible and visible to readers.
They suggest that the lists feature can lead to increased engagement with a writer's work over time.
The author appreciates the descriptive elements that can be added to lists, enhancing the reader's understanding of the content.
They find the automatic updating of lists when new content is added to be a particularly useful feature.
The author compares the curation of stories into lists to presenting artwork in a gallery, implying that it adds a level of sophistication and intentionality to content presentation.
They advocate for the lists feature as a way to maintain a tidy and navigable workspace for both writers and readers.
The author implies that the effort required to create and maintain lists is worth the potential benefits in terms of reader engagement and content organization.

For our stories to be timeless

When I was a kid and we lived, my parents, my sister, the cat and the dog, in our millstone house between the yard and the garden, Saturday morning was dedicated to the week’s groceries. As we resided in the countryside in a small hamlet of about a hundred inhabitants perched on top of a hill, it took about fifteen minutes by car to reach the first supermarket in the area. In the kitchen, not far from the gas stove, right next to a big pot filled with kitchen utensils, there was a kind of metal clip that held a small pad of long white sheets printed and cut out by my dad and used to write down the shopping list.

The precious sesame allowed my mom or dad not to forget anything when she or he walked through the aisles of the supermarket! For the youngest among you, you are not dreaming. I knew the time when smartphones didn’t exist and when people didn’t have anything connected in their pockets but only a bunch of keys and some tissues.

It was often my mom who made the menu for the week. We would sit around the dining room table and she would ask us what we would like to eat. The menu was then posted on the fridge door, again on charts created on our computer by my dad (he was also the one who designed the labels for the jams), and the shopping list took over to keep everyone happy. Most of the time we were serious and the weekly menu was followed to the letter! It was also a way to eat in a more or less balanced way.

I could tell you other stories about lists, like the time I made a list of all the girls I’ve been with (I did it in my head, and it would fit on a small piece of paper), but it wouldn’t be interesting and we’d be straying too far from today’s topic! You like it when I take you away for a while, don’t you?

The magic of lists

For the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that some readers and writers have been reading and responding to stories and poems I wrote months or even longer ago. Even though I know that generally speaking our writings remain quite visible over time, Medium can’t always make our old pieces appear. So how can people come across my dusty old stories?

I think a big part of the explanation is that I recently took the time to organize my stories and poems into lists. You can see them on my profile page in the lists tab. I’ve created lists by theme so that my readers (and new ones who have never read me before) can easily discover what I write based on their tastes. This one for example gathers all my poems.

It took me a while because almost 100% of my writing on Medium appears in these lists. But as you can see, it’s obviously paid off as it allows my older work to be read! I think I’m right in saying that people are curious and will sometimes look through these lists to see what I’ve written in the past.

Since I realized this, I now try every time I publish a story to find a place for it in one of these drawers, to make sure it will be easily found in time. Who knows, maybe Medium will still exist in a few decades! For example, I will put this piece in two lists, resources and writing.

Some writers use the feature of lists brilliantly. I’m thinking of Aparna Singh who does a great job of highlighting her work as if it were presented in an art gallery. See for example her two galleries: Angles and Lenses / Words RATIONED. There are plenty of other uses for the lists, as the writers I publish in Scribe know well since I recently did a retrospective of the year 2022 by gathering nearly 150 texts in one place. I also use it to highlight the writing prompts I organize. But today I want to emphasize the personal use we writers can make of it to highlight our own work.

How to create, edit and maintain your lists

I’m not going to stupidly copy Medium’s help on the lists feature, it’s quite comprehensive. It is ✨ here ✨.

What I can tell you, however, and what I find particularly interesting, is that for each list you create, you can add a description that appears under its title. This allows you to inform your readers immediately about the content of the list. Also, for each story added to your list, you can add a brief description that appears above the story. The lists also have a community aspect because like any story published on Medium, they have a space for responses.

Finally, and this is pretty great, if you’ve ever shared the link to one of your lists somewhere on Medium and you feed it regularly, your list overview will automatically be updated with the latest added stories. A small detail, but a cool one.

I know, it all takes a bit of time and organization, but I think Medium’s lists feature is worth it. Anyway, I hope these few lines will make you want to dust off your workspace a bit so that it shines a bit more in the light! Maybe even your readers will appreciate it.

Now you may be wondering what the connection is between the blue tit and Medium’s lists? There is none. It’s just that I remembered the blue tits coming to peck at the grease ball hanging from the old apple tree in the garden when I was a kid. Then the bird has its place here.