The New and Improved World Domination Checklist

For those of you who weren’t aware, I maintain a list of personal achievements and goals on this site that I’ve affectionately titled the world domination checklist. Well, recently I decided to upgrade that list.

Table of Contents

• Data Organization
• The World Domination Checklist
• The Growth Mindset

Data Organization

One of the things I’ve struggled with a lot on this site and in my own open-source projects is data organization. How do we effectively organize directories, files, and data, so they’re easy to use and manipulate? As it turns out, that’s not an easy question to answer.

As you can imagine, this data organization idea has followed me all the way to my World Domination Checklist. Something that was once a fun list of accomplishments and goals quickly became unwieldy. How do I properly organize the content so it’s easy to view?

That question haunted me for awhile as I went from one giant list to several smaller categorical lists. The problem was that sometimes items could fit in multiple categories, so maintenance became a nightmare. Do I put marriage under life achievements or relationship achievements?

Eventually, I came up with a great idea! What if I just dumped all my achievements into a dynamic table that could be sorted and searched? That way, I could append items as needed, and users could use the dynamic features to their own needs. So, that’s what I did!

The World Domination Checklist

One of the plugins I use on this site is called TablePress, and it’s basically a table making plugin. I use it because HTML tables are extremely limited, and there are a lot of nice features like the ability to use the same table on multiple pages. For instance, here’s the exact World Domination Checklist you’ll find on the master page:

As you can see, there are several columns that you can use to browse the collection of goals and achievements. Why not take it for a spin and let me know how you like it?

For right now, I’ve organized this so that users can sort the table by name, category, or completion status. It’s pretty easy to add a search feature as well, but I don’t care for how it looks. So, I’ll probably hold off on that until the table gets too big (200+ items).

The Growth Mindset

It might seem like a silly gimmick to track these sort of achievements on my site. After all, a lot of them aren’t that fascinating. Who cares how many anime series I’ve watched? What’s the point of sharing personal relationship goals? Aren’t some of these achievements a little arbitrary?

While all of these are great questions, I think it’s important to note that every item in this list means something to me. At the moment, I find value in tracking each and every item, so I can see where I came from and where I want to go. That’s called a growth mindset, and it keeps me from falling into a victim mentality.

So, if you have a platform, why not broadcast your own world domination checklist? You may find that you hold yourself more accountable for the things you plan to do when others want to see you succeed as well.