Raise your hand if you’ve made or read a to-do list today. Now raise your other hand if you’ve completed something off said list. Take note that I am still typing .

That’s because I have a weird, symbiotic relationship with lists: I create them, they haunt me, then I avoid them by looking at other lists online—because we all know there are lists and then there are lists.

The former is a culmination of everything you’re putting off (more on that later.) The latter is almost anything else that doesn’t relate to your personal responsibilities. From a trending BuzzFeed article to the Ten Commandments, lists are so ingrained in our lives and culture that it begs to be asked: what’s our deal with lists?

In 2009, Italian philosopher Umberto Eco claimed lists were “the origin of culture,” meaning they’re directly linked to the rise of art and literature in human history. “Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists,” he said. “What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order.”

So it’s no surprise in the digital age of information overabundance, we look to lists to create a sense of order. It’s why I’d rather skim through an article titled “10 Ways to Revamp Your Relationship” over reading a whole book on the subject. And The New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova says that’s nothing to feel guilty about. She attributes our taste for Internet lists to the fact that our brains naturally crave “effortlessly acquired data.”

“In the current media environment, a list is perfectly designed for our brain,” she writes. “We are drawn to it intuitively, we process it more efficiently, and we retain it with little effort.”

Konnikova claims that internet lists have four factors that hit our “attentional sweet spot”:

1. The headlines are eye-catching

2. The subjects are niche and self-contained

3. The info is organized in a visually pleasant design

4. The headline promises up front exactly what and how much info you’ll get

But when it comes to lists we create for ourselves, it’s a little more complicated. Throughout any given day I have my iPhone set to notify me of everything I need to do from now until death. As the notifications keep pinging and things aren’t getting crossed off as fast as I’d planned, I have to come to terms that I don’t have the time nor energy to tackle all the things my list runneth over with. So why do I even bother?