It’s easy to believe that we are much busier these days than people used to be. If you look at surveys of time use over the decades this isn’t quite true. Back in 1887 Nietzsche was complaining about the same thing, ‘One thinks with a watch in one's hand even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market’. But if you take the US as an example, a compilation of five different measures of time taken over the past 50 years, indicate that the average American man has six to nine hours more free time every week than he had five decades ago. Even so, the information explosion means that we have a huge number of news sources vying for our attention, giving us the feeling that we can never keep up – and “listicles” seem less of a burden than more forbidding, narrative articles or essays.

5. They are easy to scan for information…

Presenting articles in list form works well for snappy, isolated facts – such as the 10 most important advances made because of beer. They are also useful for practical advice – such as instructions to mend a boiler since you can scan the screen as fast as possible to find the bit relevant to you.

Even so, they do have their limits. If each point is connected to the next, studies suggest it can cause you to lose the thread of the narrative, reducing comprehension. Research has also found that it’s possible to have too many headings – and lists, of course, have a great deal of them. When researchers at the University of Washington gave students articles to read about arthritis and varied the number of headlines included, they found that although a certain number of headlines made it easier to understand, if there were too many, comprehension began to fall again. For online articles, one heading every 200 words seemed to be optimal.

6. …and we always know how much is left.



