Hit List

Literally every aspect of Pesach is either only survivable with a list or beautifully enhanced with a list.

Take cleaning, for example. Absolutely impossible to do without a list. As soon as you’ve swept up the last piece of Purim confetti, you eyeball your entire house with the cool assessing eyes of a master strategist. Then you sit down to make a list of which rooms will first be cleaned and declared chometz-free as you work your way closer to the kitchen, slowly but surely leaving a smaller and smaller chometz eating zone until you gently and lovingly push your children out onto the porch to eat their sandwiches. This is how it has been done for generations, and this is how it shall continue to be done.

Lists are also vitally important when it comes to shopping for Pesach. You can create a Master Shopping List or, to make things easier, you can have separate shopping lists for each store. (It’s important to note that some people follow the stringent interpretation of the halachah by making sure to have separate lists in order to maximize the mitzvah. If that’s your family minhag, Master Lists would not be used.)

Shopping with lists is very important because there is so much to buy and it’s easy to get overwhelmed and just buy everything you see if you don’t have a handy list to keep you focused. I once went shopping without a list on Erev Pesach, and I came home as the proud new owner of aisle 7.