How to Create a Bucket List: A Step-by-Step Guide

Why You’re Stuck in a Rut (This is the Part Where I Psychoanalyze You)

I’m not going to psychoanalyze you, but I’m going to make a few guesses based on the fact that you’re still reading. I’m going to guess that you often fantasise about change. You know that you want things to be different, but you’re not sure exactly what that looks like, or how to get there.

Your life is sort of on autopilot. You go to work, you go home. Sure, autopilot is comfy, but you’re starting to notice the passage of time. 2 months become 5 years very fast. Before you know it, you’re wondering how you got here and why you’re not happy.

You have an underlying sense of fear and anxiety surrounding change, but you pretend it’s logical. You say things like “I can’t do that, because I’m too busy” – or that you don’t have enough money, or that now isn’t the right time. Not only that, you’ve tricked yourself into feeling that motivation is coming. Honestly. Any day now. Just you wait.

I don’t know anything about what’s going on in your life right now. You could’ve lost momentum after some big life event, or you could’ve just slowly but surely worked yourself into a rut without realising it. Hell, you could be a complete go-getter, but you just need clarity on what you want to do next.

Whatever your reason for reading this, you’re stuck because you’re drifting. Your bucket list is how you grab the steering wheel and take control.

What is a Bucket List?

Right, first things first. A bucket list is not a Pinterest board full of places you’d like to visit one day when you retire. It’s also not a list you make halfway down the margin of a notebook, or God forbid, on the notes app on your phone. It’s not a “we should go to Bali“, slurred over a 4th glass of wine with your best friend who recently went through a breakup and is actually doing really well, according to her sister.

A real bucket list is a BIG personal challenge. It’s a tool to completely change your life. Most people consider it a list of things that you want to do before you die. I don’t mean that in some vague “I’ll get round to it at some point” sense, I mean literally. Before. You. Die.

A bucket list is not something you take lightly. You write it down, you revere it, you treat it like a contract that you’ve made with yourself. You create a blueprint for a life that doesn’t just happen to you. You take life by the balls and make it do exactly what you want.

Your bucket list should scare you, just a bit. It should excite you, just a lot. And, it should make future you sit back, smile, and say, “Good job, kiddo, you didn’t waste it.”

My Story: How I Got Out of a Rut with my Bucket List

Roll flashback – it’s December 2023, and I’m in the world’s most pathetic slump. I’d been prioritising work for 5 years or so, and my social life was in shambles. I realized that I was going home after a busy day in the office, and watching telly and playing old video games. I spent my time yearning for change, but struggling to make that change happen. I felt incapable of doing so.

I don’t know where the idea came from, but one morning, everything became extremely clear. I didn’t feel capable of doing what I wanted to do because, realistically, I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

And so, I set about planning a bucket list. I realized that most people create lists, but they rarely fulfill, or act on them. I decided to create a set of rules that would help me write a bucket list. These rules would help me ensure that it’s definitely going to happen.

I got to work, researching, asking, thinking, soul searching, and writing. I built a list of 100 different things that I wanted to do, and I gave myself exactly 4 years to do them.

What happened when I started my Bucket List?

And now, I’m only a year and a half in, and my life has completely turned around. I’m out of my head, I’m doing the things I always wanted to do, and I feel so much more fulfilled and at ease because of it. I find myself feeling excited for the future, and I’m booking holidays, experiences, and trips.

Friends have commented that I’ve become incredibly adventurous and exciting, and I’ve even entered a happy relationship, all because of this list! I’ve climbed glaciers, ridden motorcycles, driven boats, seen the northern lights, seen beautiful artwork, learnt things I never expected to know, given back, and experienced feelings I didn’t know were possible.

My life is so completely, vastly different and fulfilled, and I entirely and wholeheartedly have my bucket list to thank.

How to Create a Bucket List: Rules that Actually Work

So, before we start looking at the rules and guidelines for your bucket list, I’m going to stop for a quick moment and explain why I’m so obsessed with rules. This is important because it’s how you make your bucket list come true. Rules and systems allow you to follow through on things. This next part will sound like some sort of mishmash between legalism and spirituality. Creating a contract with yourself is powerful. It drives action and shapes reality.

The rules that you follow are part of your contract with yourself.

Need something more interactive before we continue? I’ve built a free bucket list creation tool here that guides you through the process. Might be worth a go if you like clicking those keyboard buttons more than reading.

Make your Bucket List Specific

Let’s introduce the first bucket list rule. You have to make your own bucket list. It has to be specific to you, but it also has to be specific in itself. You have to be clear about what you want to do. If you just yearn for a general sense of adventure, that’s great and all, but it’s certainly not specific. You need to know exactly where you want to go, and you need to feel that you want to do it.

If you don’t know what that is at the moment, don’t worry. I’ll cover techniques to find out what you want to do soon.

You need to push yourself. Remember, your bucket list should excite you! A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. Don’t create a bucket list of things that you’re just gonna do anyway. “I’m going to go to work on Monday” – sure, you get to tick off that little box on your list, and you may even get a short dopamine hit, but oh my God, that’s not the point of this, you goose.

Make your Bucket List Goals Measurable

This is the most important bucket list rule. Make it measurable. And by measurable, I mean both the bucket list and the items on it.

In fact, stop the bus, I’m adding a sub-rule here: Don’t add to the list until you’ve done the whole list. You cannot change your goalposts during a bucket list. That’s not how it works.

The second you break the contract you made with yourself, the entire contract is at risk. Have you ever done that thing where you’re lying in bed, and you count down from 5 to get out of bed? It’s so important that you always get out of bed once you hit 0, because the second that you don’t, that magic “get out of bed” spell no longer works.

Now, back to measurable. You have to know when you’ve achieved something. “I’ll go for more walks” is quite vague. How do you know when you’ve completed it? “I’ll walk 500 miles, then walk 500 more” is specific and measurable. Once you’ve hit 1000 miles, you have a binary win condition for your goal. Have you walked 999 miles? Well then, Mr Proclaimer, 1 more to go.

Now, let’s imagine that you’d only agreed to go for more walks. You’d have no quantifiable way of knowing if you’d achieved your goal, apart from a general feeling of “yeah, I guess I haven’t walked much more than I wanted to“. The same applies for lax statements like “enjoy myself more” or “spend more time with my aunt“. How will you know when you’ve spent enough time with your aunt?

Measurable win conditions don’t need to be numerical. You can create a win condition such as “I’ve made a violin from scratch, and I can play a song on it“, or “I’ve seen 100 species of birds and noted them down in my journal” or “I’ve drawn every member of my extended family as a weather phenomenon“. The important thing is that somebody external, a robot, can look at what you’ve done and decide “yes, affirmative, goal achieved“.

Make your bucket list Goals Achievable

Your goals must also be achievable. They have to be things within your control. “See fork lightning hit my neighbor Alan’s house!” is a pretty interesting goal, but how in the hell are you going to make that happen? Do you have a lightning gun? Can I borrow it?

This one is secretly one of the most important rules, too. So many people create bucket lists that are just so far out of reach that they’ll never be completed. I’m sure you’d like to win a Nobel Prize, but the chances of you doing so are probably comparable to the chances of me passing a sign saying “free garlic bread” and not making a Dan-shaped hole in the wall.

I use a hyperbolic example, but it’s sometimes easy to overestimate your abilities. Make sure that whatever you put on your list is achievable, and make sure that the list, as a whole, is achievable in the time frame that you decide to hold yourself to.

Make sure that your bucket list is relevant to you

Your Bucket List has to be relevant to what you want to do. Not things that you think your mum wants you to do, or things that society says are good. If you like the idea of skydiving, go do skydiving. If you don’t like the idea of owning a house because it feels like you’d be tied down to one part of the country, but society is pushing you to own a home because that’s what you do – fucking ignore that noise! Go skydiving instead!

I’m deadly serious about this one, and it’s one that people will likely skip over. Don’t add things that you think you’re supposed to add – you’ll resent doing them.

Keep in mind that your Bucket List is about living the life that you want to live. Rarely in life do we have an opportunity to choose a path wherein we truly get to experience life as we want to experience it. This Bucket List, your Bucket List, is the tool that enables you to do so. If you’re shackled by the expectations of those around you, you will be unable to stay true to your desires. And, as much as that sounds like something a villain might have said in the hit TV Show Charmed, I mean it pretty sincerely.

Make your Bucket List Goals Timely

Often, I hear people say that they’d love to visit Hawaii someday, but they never actually put a timeline on when they’re going to visit. Without putting a clear timeline in place, it’s easy to put plans off. So there’s the last rule of a bucket list. It must have a sense of urgency. If you give yourself 20 years to visit Hawaii, what’s stopping you from getting to the British Airways sale every year and saying “bah I’m busy this summer, I have a thing, I’ll do it next year” ad infinitum.

In the West, we have a very myopic view of our mortality. We struggle to really come to terms with the idea that one day we’ll stop existing. That, unfortunately, means that when we make vast sweeping statements like “I’d love to see the northern lights before I die,” we show very little intention of actually making our desires happen.

There’s a flip side to this rule, of course. If your bucket list is too urgent, it becomes impossible to achieve. Visit Hawaii by Monday is very different from “visit Hawaii within 2 years“. You must set realistic expectations for yourself, but you must push yourself. Find the balance. Getting out of a rut is like pushing a heavy cart. At the beginning, it takes a LOT of effort, but as you gather momentum, everything becomes much easier.

Using SMART Goals for your Bucket List

Cool, them’s the rules! If you’re into life management, or business, you’ll have likely recognized a few of these rules as a rehash of SMART goals. For those unfamiliar, SMART goals are:

• Specific – know exactly what you want to do
• Measurable – know what your win condition is
• Achievable – set yourself realistic goals
• Relevant – make sure it’s something that you want to do
• Timely – set a time constraint

When your goal does not follow the SMART goal format, you lack clarity. You cannot track progress; you risk making it unachievable, uninteresting, and unhelpful. Most notably in our case, you grant yourself no urgency to make the goal happen.

Now, I personally decided that I was going to go big for mine. I promised that I’d complete 100 goals in 4 years. That’s big, it averages out at around 2 weeks for each goal on the list. I have some things on my list that I could sort pretty quickly, like “make a shirt from scratch“, but I also have big things on the list that will take time to do: “learn Clair de Lune on piano“.

What that does mean is that there has not been a moment since I started the project that I’ve not had a clear idea of what I should be doing. I now always know what I should be working towards.

How Many Things Should be on Your Bucket List?

Of course, I’ve started a bit of a cult with this list, and other people have different quantities of goals in differing amounts of time. I’ve often seen that people have 20 things in 2 years on their bucket lists. That’s a good, achievable amount of time. You’re realistically going to have to make moves pretty quickly to fulfill your list, so there’s a sense of urgency, but you’re also not pushing such a strong lifestyle change that you need to start giving things up to complete your list.

When making your list, you need to weigh up what resources you have at your disposal. What you’re willing to trade off to achieve your goals, and what sort of lifestyle change you want to see. If you have commitments, like kids or a small dog, you need to make sure that your goals fit into those commitments. If you’re a dad of 3, and you want to move to Alaska and live off-grid, you’d better make sure that there are good schools out there, and not just some shabby old bus.

I’ve found that, since making my list, I’ve had some pretty major lifestyle changes, mainly meeting and getting engaged with my fiancée. What this means is that many of the trips I wanted to do have now doubled in price. I’ve also found that, because so many of the things on my list required international travel, I’ve had to start to prioritize trips and turn down offers to visit people on account of saving money.

The reverse of this, if I’d’ve created a list with 5 things on it, and given myself 10 years to do them, I guarantee I’d’ve never gotten them done. You need to feel that constant sense of progress, so having a mix between big things, small things, and medium things is key to making sure you keep at it.

Cool, now let’s move on to how to come up with ideas for your bucket list.

How to come up with ideas for your Bucket List

Coming up with ideas for your bucket list is way harder than you’d expect. I took 31 days to come up with my list. I started just jotting down everything I wanted to do, or liked the idea of doing, that I had been putting off. I managed to make a list of 40 something things, before I started to hit brain traffic. I realized that after years of not knowing what I wanted to do, it’s a pretty hard task to sit down and figure out what you want.

I found that online lists were aplenty, but many of them had similar things. I found that most of them were ChatGPT-generated word vomits of listicles. I will not pretend that these lists were not helpful. They helped me fill mine; however, I insist that you do not rely on them entirely. Spend some time figuring it out for yourself. Even if it takes you a month, it’s worth it. I’d also suggest deciding how many items you want on your list (and your timeframe) before starting the list itself.

So, how do you make a bucket list idea? Follow the rules! Keep it specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. But for many of us, it’s hard actually to know what you want to do. So, I’ve made a useful resource: a long list of questions that will leave you with a fat list of everything that could go on your bucket list.

I know I keep plugging it, but people have told me they find it really valuable for figuring out what they want to do in life, so I’m going to point you in the direction of the free bucket list builder tool. Just click here.

I’m going to give you a list of prompts below. These are for you, not ChatGPT, or Grok, or your AI girlfriend. I want you to read one, then grab a bit of paper. Yes, physical paper, I know – and jot down answers. Answer them honestly and with care. This will help you.

• What are 5 things you wanted to do as a kid, but never actually did?
• What are 5 things your friends have done that you’re envious of, and you wish you’d done?
• Has there ever been anything that you’ve turned down that you’d’ve liked to have done?
• What’s something that a family member did, and enjoyed, and spoke about fondly, perhaps they even drop it in conversation often?
• What are 5 things that you think would make a really bitchin’ cool camera shot in the biopic they make about your life?
• What are 3 BIG picture goals that would make you feel really proud of yourself.
• What are 3 things you could do this month that would make you the most interesting person at the next party you’re at?
• Who is your favorite character in a book, film, TV show, game, etc. What do they do? What do they want to do? Do you want to do it?
• What’s something you’ve been putting off for ages?
• What are 5 things that would make your life better if you did them this year?
• What are 5 places that you’d love to go, but never have?
• What’s a hobby you’re interested in exploring, but haven’t had the chance to yet?
• imagine somebody you really look up to. They don’t have to be real, just the idea of someone you really admire. What sort of things does that person do that you don’t?
• What’s your favorite animal? Can you interact with it in some way?
• What are some special dishes that you’ve always wanted to make, or perfect, and just haven’t yet.
• Who do you want to hang out with more? What could you do that would facilitate that?
• Are you scared of anything? Do you want to face that fear?
• What is something you’d do if failure had ZERO consequences?
• If you had a year with no obligations, what would you do with it?
• When was the last time you felt completely alive? What were you doing? What else would make you feel that way?
• What’s one culture in the world that you’ve always been interested in?
• What’s a tourist thing in your own city or country that you’ve never done?

Now that’s a long ass list of questions, but I pinky promise you that if you spend a little time on each, and answer all of them, you’ll have an amazing list ready to collate, curate, and perfect.

If you’re going to use ChatGPT or another LLM, I suggest prompting it to ask you questions about yourself, then giving your list of ideas. Shape the results it gives you. Give it positive feedback for the goals it generates that you like, and negative feedback for the ones you don’t like.

My Bucket List (Steal These)

Still need inspiration? I’m going to stick my list below. Feel free to steal as many as you like. I get off on the fact that I’m a deep, inspirational figure to so many strangers on the internet.

You can, of course, click on any of these and read about my experiences.

1. Get into flying (Original: Get pilot’s license)
2. Climb Scafell Pike, Snowdon, and Ben Nevis
3. Experience hunting
4. Make a leather bag
5. Kayak all of windermere ✓
6. Weigh 95kg again
7. Marathon Hike (please donate!)
8. Sort pension out properly
9. Write and record a song
10. Make another short film ✓
11. Make a guitar
12. Ride a horse
13. Climb Stromboli
14. Do a thru-hike
15. Go to a concert for an artist from the list ✓
16. Visit Scotland
17. ride a motor bike ✓
18. Swim in a mountain river
19. Fix up something mechanical ✓
20. Rock climb ✓
21. Walk Caminito del Rey in Malaga
22. Ski
23. See the northern lights ✓
24. Surf
25. Eat at a Michellin star restaurant
26. Drive a boat ✓
27. learn a martial art
28. Learn to dance ✓
29. breathe fire
30. catch a fish
31. Bungee jump
32. Go to the US ✓
33. Go to star observatory ✓
34. Play sultans of swing on guitar
35. Explore a cave in the dark ✓
36. Hold a tarantula
37. Eat a freshwater fish
38. Go to a spa ✓
39. Do archery ✓
40. Return to Cornwall
41. Go to the theater ✓
42. Herpetological study in Sardinia / Srilanka / Costa Rica / or Arizona
43. See a Rothko in person ✓
44. Lasso something
45. See a blackbird at an aviation museum ✓
46. Sunrise at stonehenge ✓
47. Make a documentary
48. Do a cooking class
49. Participate in a conservation effort
50. Contribute to a citizen scientist project ✓
51. Make chocolate from scratch
52. Try beekeeping ✓
53. Walk on hot coals
54. See Monument Valley
55. Go to a Buddhist session ✓
56. Learn navigation properly ✓
57. Find a fossil ✓
58. Make a stained glass beetle
59. Make a shirt from scratch
60. See / Hike Cadini di Misurina
61. Have a conversation in Russian
62. Donate blood ✓
63. Learn first aid
64. Yoga – do the crow pose
65. Do something at an open mic
66. Eat entirely for free by foraging ✓
67. Perfect homemade pasta ✓
68. Go to a Natural History Museum “late” session (or similar)
69. Zipline on Velocity 2
70. See a manta ray
71. Breed a beetle
72. Create a videogame
73. Faroe OR Skye OR Shetland
74. Take singing lessons
75. Try falconry
76. Make a taxidermy piece
77. Film something in super 8
78. Do a cycle holiday (Cornwall to scotland?)
79. Drive a mustang ✓
80. Make a pair of Heelys
81. Try smithing ✓
82. Night Hike
83. Write a great story
84. Stand on a tiny island where I can see all sides ✓
85. Visit Sicily
86. Plant 100 trees ✓
87. See a cave painting
88. Learn all the constellations
89. See bioluminescent algae ✓
90. Go to a rage room ✓
91. Learn bar tending tricks
92. Learn to draw people ✓
93. Do wine tasting ✓
94. Do a muscle up
95. Read house of leaves ✓
96. Design and invent something
97. Visit Africa
98. Experience Amsterdam
99. Go to an Abandoned City ✓
100. Play Clair de lune on piano

Now, go young Padawan, and grab a bit of paper – jot these down, you’ve got this. And make sure to drink some water, stay hydrated.

How to Maintain and Track Your Bucket List

You’re not going to like this, but you have to keep track of the damn thing. Writing a bucket list is cute; it feels good to do. Maintaining and keeping on top of your bucket list? That’s a whole other kettle of fish fingers.

If your list lives in an email you sent to yourself in 2019, it’s not a list, it’s a ghost. You need visibility, and you need reminders. You need to stare your ambition dead in the face every day and embrace that trait of yourself. Every single person who has gotten this far has enough drive in them to make their list happen.

That being said, here’s how to track your bucket list without making it a full-time job.

Write your Bucket List down, physically.

I’ve mentioned pen and paper a few times now, and no doubt I’ll mention it a few more times. I’m like a broken record, if a record spoke about stationery. I kept my list in a little notebook before I plastered it across my website and started writing a story for each goal I ticked off my list. I really, really insist, get yourself an analogue way of writing your list. Stick it on the fridge, or your desk, or your forehead. Just make sure you can see it.

Make checking your bucket list a ritual

Not good at remembering things? Get your phone out, find your reminder app or whatever it is you TikTok generation use. Weekly, Daily, fortnightly, I don’t care how often it reminds you, I’m not your stepdad. Track completions in a way that feels good. You want to get a second bit of dopamine for ticking something off the list. That way, you’ll want to do it more often? See – Pavlov yourself into living the life you want!

Capture the moment

Take a picture! Or a video! Or journal about it! Codify your journey, and share it with the world. Now, this whole endeavor you’re embarking on shouldn’t be about getting more likes on your faceinstagrambook, but sharing your progress with the world is a fantastic way of keeping on track, and celebrating how your life is changing. I find that looking back at the photos and videos I’ve collected of everything I’ve done is already like fishing an old photo album out. It feels good. I feel good.

Make a Calendar

Or a filofax, in my case. I promise you I actually have a Filofax, and in it, I have upcoming entries of date-relevant goals. I want to try falconry, and I’ve been told to get in touch with someone in particular in September, so in my little life planner book, lo and behold, September 3rd, I have a note to get in touch with the falcon man.

Use a free bucket list tracker tool

There’s a nifty bucket list creator tool that’ll guide you through coming up with all the goals on your bucket list, then track them based on difficulty, cost, time commitment, feasibility, all those cool factors. It’s a great resource for bucket list apasionados, and it makes keeping track of your bucket list really easy. Plus, you can export your bucket list as a CSV or pdf at any point so you can stick it on your wall or email it to your cat.

Your main takeaway from the section should be that if your bucket list isn’t in front of you, it’s behind you, and that’s where the monsters and Simon Cowell live.

Psychological Tricks to help you Complete Bucket List goals

I’m going to talk about some nice psychological tricks to help you follow through on your bucket list. These are the sort of small things you can tag along your lists to make them much easier to follow up o. The idea is that these are like removing speed bumps. They’ll let you go much smoother, and much quicker!

Write down your goals on paper

Write it down. No, not type it down. Write it down. I’m not smart enough to understand why, but writing something down with a pen on paper is a powerful act. You create a physical change in the world with an intention of what you will do. It’s different from typing something in on a computer, where nothing is constant; everything is changing. Instead, you have set something in the stationary equivalent of stone.

I’m reinforcing this point because it matters. You ideally want somewhere where you can see the list. If that’s above your desk, or next to your bed, or on a scrap of paper on the fridge, it counts. Of course, you’re welcome to have it on the notes app on your phone as well – in fact, that’s a good idea, you’ll be able to access it and share it nice and easily. But do not underestimate the power of pen and paper.

Perfectionism kills progression

Have you ever heard of an MVP? No, not the basketball thing, Minimum Viable Product. It’s the idea that you create the simplest, quickest, easiest, most basic version of the completed thing you’re trying to do. It’s so easy to put off doing something out of fear of it not being perfect. If you create something imperfect, at the very least, you can improve on it, correct it, and shape it afterwards. You can improve something imperfect, you cannot improve nothingness.

Don’t tell your friends, at least at first.

I’d also recommend that you don’t tell anybody about your list until you’ve done a few things on the list. You get a dopamine hit from telling somebody that you’re turning your life around. That’s great and all, but for many people, it’s often enough. Planning can feel euphoric, but you can get stuck in this pre-production phase of changing your life forever if you’re not careful.

Write down why you’re doing the things on your bucket list

I stole this one from this 7×7 habit builder grid. The idea is that you have a 7×7 grid, where each cell is a day. At the top, just above your grid, you write what habit you want to build, “I will do 50 press-ups every day”.Then, next to your goal, you write the reason you’re doing it. “I need to build more discipline, and I need to get in better shape so that I feel better about myself when I’m in public”.

The same thing applies to the bucket list. Why do you want to drive a Mustang? In my case, it’s because I’d deified this car as the coolest of the cool, and I wanted to see whether it lived up to expectations, and I wanted to feel like a rich twat for a day.

Use the 2-minute rule to start tasks

One of the big things that gets in the way of completing a bucket list is just starting goals in the first place. I have a neat little trick. When I’m feeling lazy, I decide that I’m going to dedicate just 2 minutes towards the task. Maybe it’s a bit of research for when I can see the sunrise at Stonehenge, maybe it’s finding where I’m most likely to find fossils. The thing is, once I’ve given it two minutes, sometimes my little monkey brain doesn’t realize that I’ve accidentally been at it for 10 minutes. Then all of a sudden, I’ve got plans, a date in the diary, and tickets booked!

Ask for help

This one may be obvious for some of you, but it certainly wasn’t for me. Ask for help! You know those friends you have? And those acquaintances? Most of them are also people, and most of them want to do things! Many of them might be feeling just like you, where they just don’t know what to do, and don’t have the drive to make things happen right now.

When you write your list, check through it. Then, go through your list of friends. Who wanted to try out rock climbing a few summers ago? Who said they’d love to make a short film, but didn’t have any good ideas in the pipeline. Who’s got access to a boat, or a tarantula, or a telescope?

You may feel awkward asking them, but I promise you, I‘ve found that a solid 100% of people love the idea of this bucket list, and like the idea of being involved. Reach out to people, go make friends.

Act like it’s already happening

Starting right this second, you are no longer a person who is unhappy with their life. Starting right this second, you are a driven, adventurous, exciting person who embraces life. There is just one thing in the way, which is writing your bucket list. You are no longer permitted to define yourself by those traits that you do not admire. Fake it until you make it, sweet cheeks, you’ve got this.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

Making your bucket list goals too vague

“travel more”. “learn something new”. “Be a better cook”.

Scroll back up to the rules, buckaroo – they’re not concise enough. Make it specific, and make it binary. “See the cherry blossom season in Japan”. “Learn 10 recipes from 10 different countries”. If a dumb robot cannot verify that it’s been accomplished, you’ve not been clear enough. You must be able to define your win condition.

Making your Bucket List too hard

“Run a marathon this year” – have you ever done a 5k before? Oh, you’re dangerously overweight and haven’t done sport in a decade? No harm in that, but fuck me, you’re going to either kill yourself doing this, or give up. “Become fluent in 4 languages by September” – It’s June you dingus, pick something achievable. Try having a conversation with somebody in the language you’re trying to learn, or running a 5k this year instead. Don’t aim too low, but oh my God, make sure you can actually do the thing.

Your Bucket List Has No Timeframe

“Someday I’d love to..” SHUT UP! No. Stop, I never want to hear it again. In the context of bucket lists, “Someday” is an ugly word. It’s all the worst curse words, mixed with all the nastiest slurs, mixed with everything a politician has ever lied about. You need to have clear timeframes for when you’re going to be doing these things. Your bucket list cannot coast on maybes. Take control. Put clear dates in!

Constantly adding new items to your bucket list

If you keep constantly adding new items to your bucket list, you’re never going to finish your bucket list. If you’re that creative and that excited about life, start a second list, bucket list 2 – but don’t you dare start that until you’ve finished bucket list 1. You’re perfectly welcome to realize you want to do something one day, then do it; that’s not illegal. But you cannot rupture the sanctity of the bucket list by rewriting your contract with yourself after you’ve started.

Copying someone else’s bucket list

You lazy fuck. I take back what I said in the previous section about me being some sort of cult messiah. If you’re just copying someone else’s list, you’re doing what other people wanted to do. Take inspiration, steal ideas, but if I catch any one of you fuckers with 100 things to do in 4 years and they’re all just variations of my list, I’m going to get adopted by your Mum and she’s going to like me more, because I’ll call more often.

Not reviewing your bucket list progress

Can’t see the list? Is it stuck in some notes app on an old phone? If you’re not constantly adding that polite little ✓ on each completed item on your list, you’re not seeing progress. Review it, and review it often. Home after a long day of work with nothing to do apart from watch reruns of Friends on Netflix? No, snap out of it, you’re supposed to be practicing guitar. Pull a finger out and stick it on some strings.

Waiting until you “have time”

Deadass, I expect that there’s a bit of you that thinks that you’ll come back to this article in a few days when you have free time. I’m offering you a way out, amigo. If you want to make changes, you need to instigate those changes. The world will not hand you opportunities. It’s your responsibility to go out and find them. If you have nothing on right now, commit to making your life work for you. Get your pen, get your paper, get yourself started.

Final Thoughts on Writing your own Bucket List

Right (slaps knees). I’d best be off, I’ve got some living to do. You’ve got the questions, the prompts, the rules, and the plan. You’ve even got my list that you can shamelessly rip off, you seafaring scallywag. All that’s left is for you to get off your arse and actually do something.

So, come on, stop scrolling, get your pen, get your paper. Start writing.

Because, and I mean this – if you don’t start now, when?

No one’s coming to save you; nobody is going to swoop in and fix your life for you. That’s your responsibility, and yours alone. This bucket list is your rope, not in the noose sense, but in the “I’m stuck in a hole with somewhere to fix a rope to get myself out” sense.

What I would like you to do – once you’ve written your list, get in touch with me. Send me your list, I want to see it. If there’s anything I can do on that list to make it happen, I’ll help you. If you’re still finding excuses not to make one, I literally wrote software to help you figure out what you want to do. How magic is that? It’s right here. Oh, and if you want to learn more about my Bucket List, jot your email address down below and I’ll keep you in the loop.

Go on then, fuck off. You’ve got a life to build.