Sometimes I make lists of things to do in years ahead: a prose book I mean to write; a new book of poems, with a guess at the year when it ought to finish itself; new short stories; revision of a textbook. These lists get lost. Opening an old notebook, I find a list from the late 1970s. It surprises me to find that I had already planned something accomplished a decade later; it surprises me that I wrote so many things I planned to write. But also, I notice a forgotten project that interests me again: In the old notebook I make new notes.

Monthly lists take a place beside my blue living-room chair; on my desk, I keep a list of ongoing things—like Life Work—and smaller projects that will take three or four weeks: reviewing Tom Williams’s short stories for the Globe; doing a piece on graveyards for Harrowsmith; outlining a proposal for a children’s book. When a project turns active with drafts and revisions, I put a checkmark beside it to identify it as ongoing—as if I needed to inform myself. Apparently I like to make checkmarks. Like all listmakers, I enjoy drawing lines through items that I have finished. Listmakers without exception occasionally accomplish some task which they never planned to do, and which they never put on a list; listmakers write the item down, in order to feel the satisfaction of crossing it out.

When the Britannica takes on Work, it qualifies the noun and addresses “Work, Organization of,” but it supplies a definition when you’re not looking: Work is “activities necessary to society’s survival.” (The Britannica does not think of work as something people do; everything is passive.) How boring it sounds, like most discussions of work. When Adam Smith talks about the eighteen divisions of labor in making a pin, or when Emile Durkheim does something similar, I fall asleep. Slaveowner Cicero writes more to my taste.

It is the family farm—which historians of work’s structure derive from utter antiquity—that provides a model for my own work; one task after another, all day all year, and every task different. Of course: It was precisely the Connecticut family business of the Brock-Hall Dairy—milk pasteurizing and bottling and delivering; every-day-the-same, temporarily efficient subdivision of the industrial world; my father’s curse—that I grew up determined to avoid or evade. And did.

In the “Day-Timer” beside my blue chair I keep a daily list. It is a pleasure, sleepy at night watching the Red Sox one-run behind in the seventh inning, to pick up the “Day-Timer,” tear off today’s corner, flip to tomorrow’s page and list the next day’s work. Recent pages read “Mertens at 2” (an interview about the National Endowment for the Arts); “5 o’clock Jerry” (my appointment with the dentist who is my son-in-law); and “Ct” (driving to Connecticut for a visit with my mother.) Most days begin with laconic single words in a semantic order: