A Corollary To My Wish List Philosophy

I love wish lists. When it comes to gift giving, I think they are essential. Everybody wins - the giver knows what you're interested in and you can give them something they want, the receiver doesn't have to go out and by everything they want, they can just queue it up for others.

But, as my Mother-in-Law found out last time she bought me some items off my wish list, they aren't perfect. I had accidentally forgotten to remove a book from the list which she bought for me. It was an excellent book - just one I didn't need.

Also, over time wishlist had grown to be about 500 items. This was good because it meant that folks could buy something off it and still surprise me. But, it also meant that there was stuff on there I was no longer that eager to have as a gift.

The solution, was as my Mother-in-Law put it, to do a purge.

And so that's what I did and will now include in my Wish List Importance soapbox speech. Specifically, I:

• Create a new private wishlist named Scratchpad
• Went to my overflowing wishlist, and selected Compact view which shows 100 items per page
• I then went Shopping on my list, and tried to find about 10 items per page that I really wanted and would be super excited to get
• I checked these items off and then moved them to my Scratchpad list
• When the Scratchpad was perfect, I renamed the current Wishlist to be Wishlist Retired - 4/21/2010 and marked it as private. And then moved the scratched to my new public Wishlist

The shopping step was of course tricky to do, because I genuinely liked what was on my wishlist. But having it be so large wasn't doing anyone any good.

I thought about making up sub-wishlists. A books one, a tools one, etc. But in the end, I like the idea that folks can browse through my wishlist and see all kinds of things. Also, I like to be able to add items to the wishlist in a hurry, and having one accomplishes this.

I figure, if I do a purge once a year, I should have a lean and mean list.

To finish off the whole process, I updated the Wishlist link in the sidebar of the blog, so folks can actually find it.