Updated October 14  /  Marisol Ferrante

How I build a list

Almost every packing list on the internet is sorted by category. That is the wrong axis.

Category sorting - clothes, toiletries, electronics - is how you would organise a shop. It is not how packing happens. Packing happens in blocks of time: the week before, the night before, the ten minutes at the door, the terminal, the seat. A list sorted by category asks you to jump between blocks and you will drop something in the gaps.

Rule one: order by when

Every list here is in the order you will actually do it. Tyre pressures a week out, cheese on the morning. If two items happen at the same moment they sit next to each other even if one is a sock and one is a passport.

Rule two: one screen

If it does not fit on a phone screen at a glance, it will not get read at 5am. The master list is the one exception and it is explicitly not a packing list.

Rule three: a line has to earn its grams

Every item is a small cost paid on every trip forever. The travel towel cost me maybe 200 grams a trip for four years and got used twice. That is a bad trade and it took me too long to see it. When I am unsure, I mark the line as testing, use it for three trips, and count.

Rule four: write the reason, not the rule

"Bring gloves" gets ignored. "22 grams, and it is the difference between an enjoyable and a miserable morning" does not. Half the lines here have a note under them and the note is doing most of the work.

Rule five: the list is allowed to be wrong

The swaps page exists because readers travel in ways I do not. I have lost two arguments in public on that page and both times the list got better.

What I do not do

No printables behind a signup. No affiliate gear links - the moment a list can earn money by adding an item, the list gets longer, and a longer list is a worse list. No seasonal reruns of the same post with a new headline. If a list has not changed, I leave it alone and change the date only when the content changes.