Where the Bucket List Came From, and the Small Plans I'd Write Instead

“So what’s on your bucket list?” my friend asked me, and I said “Iceland, probably,” and we both nodded as if that settled something. It settled nothing, and eleven months later neither of us had looked at a flight.

This is a letter I’d send a friend, written for this page. The narrator and the friend I’m calling Sam are constructed, and so are their evenings. The history below is real, and I’ve flagged where I’m less sure.

Dear Sam,

You asked me last week how to make life more exciting, and I gave you a shrug and a joke. Here is the longer answer. Short version: a bucket list is a list of things you hope to do someday, and “someday” has never once shown up on a calendar. A small plan with a date and a witness beats a grand list. Now the long version, starting with the history, because I got curious.

Where does the term “bucket list” come from?

The phrase is younger than most people assume. It rests on the idiom “kick the bucket,” meaning to die, which shows up in print at least as far back as Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785. Nobody has settled why a bucket. The favorite theories involve hanging, or a beam called a “bucket” in old butchering practice, and none of them has won.

The list itself is a modern coinage. According to reference writing on the term, the screenwriter Justin Zackham wrote himself a list around 1999 titled something like “Justin’s List of Things to Do Before I Kick the Bucket,” and shortened it to “Justin’s Bucket List.” Years later he built a screenplay on the idea, and the film The Bucket List came out in 2007, directed by Rob Reiner, with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men on a road trip through their wish lists. Language writers, Ben Zimmer among them, have generally credited the film with putting the phrase into everyday speech, and nothing convincing pushes the term much further back. If you see an older date floating around, treat it with suspicion.

So the thing we all say casually is about twenty-five years old, and it was born inside a movie about dying. That matters, and I’ll get to why.

Why do lists of far-off things fail?

Think about what the film’s list is. Skydiving, seeing the pyramids, driving a fast car. Every item is big and expensive, and every item is attached to a deadline that only the diagnosis provides. Take away the diagnosis and you keep the wishes but lose the deadline. What you have left is a wish list with a morbid name.

A wish with no date has no first step, and a wish with no first step gets no witness. Nobody can ask you on Thursday how the Iceland thing is going, because there is no Iceland thing, only a mood. This is the same trouble that psychologists working on plan-making keep finding: goals that say “when, where and with whom” get done more than goals that say “someday.” I wrote about that research and how to use it in this piece on if-then planning, and you can borrow the trick directly.

There is also the friend problem. When we say “we should do that sometime,” each of us hears an invitation and neither of us hears a commitment. Two people agree, warmly, and then both wait for the other to move. I have been the one waiting more than I would like to admit.

What actually works: a small plan with a date and a witness

I ran the experiment on myself this summer, badly and without controls, so take it as one person’s log. I stopped making lists and started making bookings: one small thing per week, put in the calendar with a day, an hour, a place and a name. The size dropped a lot. Nothing was Iceland. What changed was that my weeks had corners in them, and I kept mentioning them to people, which turned out to be the important part.

People have known this trick for a long time. Odysseus had himself tied to the mast so that a decision he made calmly would bind the person he’d be later, and there are more examples than you would expect in this history of commitment devices before apps. A dated plan with a friend is the low-budget version: you have handed a small decision to a person who will notice if you drop it.

That is also where I use a phone tool, and I’ll say it plainly once. For the plans that start early, I use an alarm app called DontSnooze, where the alarm gives me 30 seconds to record a video showing I’m up, and if I don’t, a random photo from my camera roll goes to my friends. It turns the people I’m meeting into witnesses to whether I got out of bed. It does nothing for the other plans on the list, which mostly run on the dinner table and a calendar invite.

The list I’d write instead

Ten plans, each small enough for a weekday or a weekend, each meant to go in the calendar with a name next to it. Pick two this week.

1. This Saturday, 7:00 a.m.: watch the sunrise from the highest spot within twenty minutes’ walk or drive. Bring a thermos. Check the actual sunrise time first; it moves by minutes each week, and I once got it wrong by half an hour. There is a computed table for thirteen cities if you want a sense of how much it moves.
2. Next Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.: cook a dish from a country neither of you has cooked. Each person buys one ingredient and brings one question.
3. The first Sunday of next month, 10:00 a.m.: swim in the coldest water within reach. Two minutes is plenty. Somebody holds the towels.
4. This Friday after work: walk home a different way, with a friend on the phone or at your side. Photograph one thing you have never noticed.
5. Two weeks from Thursday, 8:00 p.m.: go to an event in a genre you would never pick, such as a bowling league night, a poetry slam, or a town council meeting. Sit somewhere that lets you leave.
6. On the 15th, lunch: swap playlists with three friends and each listen to one whole album someone else chose. Report back by text before the day ends.
7. Next Saturday, afternoon: one-item day trip. Pick a town within ninety minutes that you have only driven through and stop for exactly one thing there.
8. The last Friday of this month, 6:00 p.m.: host a bad-skills night. Everyone teaches everyone one thing they are mediocre at.
9. A weeknight before the month ends: build something in two hours, a bench, a bread, a bad short film. It has to exist by bedtime.
10. Before the year is out, one evening: visit the place you two lived when you met, or the nearest equivalent, and eat at whatever is there now.

Notice what these have in common. Each has a date, each finishes inside a day, each needs at least one other person to show up, and none costs much. Any of them can also grow: number 7 can become a weekend, and number 2 can become a supper club. The bigger trip can then come out of a small plan that already exists, not the other way round.

What to do with the old list

If you want the arithmetic behind the urgency, the age-by-age count of weeks left is a sobering first step.

Keep it, and reread it once a year. Cross off what no longer sounds like you. Take whatever remains and ask what the smallest true first step is that fits inside a weekend. Book that step, with a friend, this month. If you can’t find one, the item was decoration.

And to answer your question properly: life gets more exciting when the calendar contains things you are slightly nervous about and somebody else is expecting. The excitement comes from having a plan you might actually keep.

Saturday, 7:00, top of the hill by the water tower. Bring gloves. I’ll text you the sunrise time.

Yours, A.