Why I Don’t Use Medium Lists to Organize My Articles as a Writer
And what I use instead
Medium lists let you organize your articles, whether you’re a Medium writer or a content consumer, allowing you to categorize the articles of your choice.
Many Medium writers use them to organize the articles they write, to create series, or to group them by theme, for example. Personally, I don’t do it that way. I’ve been asked several times why, so I’ve decided to do an article to explain why I don’t use this feature, and what I use instead.
What Medium lists let you do
Medium lists are pretty well done. Here’s a summary of what you can do with them:
- They can be made public or private, so that they are displayed or not when a user views your profile.
- You can add a description.
- You can add notes to each item in the list.
- Finally, you can reorganize items to give them a specific order.
What The Medium Lists Are Missing
In the end, Medium lists are very basic and allow you to organize your articles simply. This simplicity means that there are a few features missing that I’d really like to see.
Firstly, you can’t nest multiple lists. This is annoying when you write a lot of articles on a variety of subjects, but still belong to the same broad category. For example, I write a lot about tech, but it’s a very broad subject. I could very well be talking about AI, programming, etc… So making a “Tech” list isn’t relevant because it would contain too many articles mixed up between different subjects, and would ultimately no longer meet the need to organize one’s articles.
Alternatively, I could create an AI list, a programming list, etc… But these lists need to be grouped together because they depend on a similar theme, and doing that for each topic would end up with dozens of lists. Because even within the Python list, I can still divide it into several categories, and what’s more, I don’t write only tech-related articles, so I don’t want to have to manage 50 lists.
Secondly, closely related to the first point, you can’t add categories within a list. For example, if I’m writing about Python, that’s very broad too, so I can organize my articles into categories. On the other hand, I don’t have enough articles to create lists specifically for them (there’s no point in having a list of 2 articles I think), so simply adding a category to a list might have worked for me.
Another thing that bothers me about Medium lists is that you can only put articles in them. It might sometimes be useful to store links or images, but that’s not possible…
All these points mean that I’ve had to find an alternative to Medium lists.
“Index” Articles
The idea is quite simple: instead of storing items in Medium lists, store them in an article. In this way, you have the flexibility of an article, while meeting the same need that lists do, which is to organize your articles.
So you can store articles, links, images… Organize items by category, using titles. And much more.
The problem with this is that your index items end up lost in your article flow. There are several solutions to this problem.
First, you can pin them to your profile. This way, they can be accessed quickly from your Medium profile without having to scroll through all your articles.
You can also store them in a list.
Finally, you can store them in every article you publish. By this I mean adding a list of links to relevant index articles at the end or beginning of each article.
What I Do
For my part, I’ve decided to store my main index articles in an “About Me” article which is pinned to my profile. I also store them at the end of each article.
However, I have a lot of index articles. So to avoid putting too many each time, I’ve nested them inside each other. For example, on my “About Me” page, there are only index articles for the main themes (tech, personal development, etc.). Then, within these articles, you’ll find others corresponding to sub-themes. Then, within these sub-themes, you can find others, etc…
This means that from my “About Me” article onwards, absolutely all my articles are accessible, although I don’t put all my index articles there.
Think of it as a funnel structure. You start at the widest point and work your way down.
Also, below each article, I put the links to the main indexes. For example, an article on data science in Python will contain the following indexes: Data Science < Python < Tech < Master, Master being the “About Me” article from which any article can be accessed.
This may sound complicated, but it’s actually extremely simple. To help me easily find the right categories and links, I’ve created a mind map that also contains the links to the index articles.
Final Note
All this may seem like a lot just to organize articles, but when you’ve written over 300 of them, and you’re not about to stop, I guarantee you that you need an efficient way of organizing them, so that you and your readers can find their way around.
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