In 1999, Sasha Cagen placed an ad asking people to send her their to-do lists in the mail. The lists she got became To-Do List magazine and todolistblog.blogspot.com/. Now, she's compiled some lists for To-Do List, the book.

Pop Life talked to her (via e-mail) about her work and her life as a to-do-listologist.

PL: It seems to me that some folks resist list writing because it is so organized, and maybe seems anal, and thus undesirable. Do you think your blog and book have helped some people see listing as a positive thing?

Cagen: I started collecting To-Do Lists back in 2000 and since then I have gathered about 5,000 of them. What amazes me -- and why I really felt like I needed to put this book together -- is how quirky, revealing and honest they can be about people's personalities, what we really want to do, alongside what we need to get out of the way.

We all have our own list quirks, and they all show up in the page. I've noticed interesting patterns from collecting so many lists. Some list makers are anal. You can see how anal people can get in their color-coded Excel spreadsheets. But for a lot of people, the list is as much a work of art as it is a tool to get things done. Or the lists are just psychotic-looking, or look like ransom notes. They're amazingly honest because they're conversations that people were having with themselves and that they didn't expect others to see.

PL: It seems to me that the act of writing is what's so powerful about listing, that in some way writing things down makes them more real, almost like a contract with yourself. Am I overanalyzing? And do you think the advent of the computer has affected listing in anyway?

Cagen: The book is very much a study of people's individuality through their handwriting -- and all their handwriting says about them. In the Reasons for Losing Weight List, we see the amazing slanted cursive handwriting of a schoolteacher who wants to lose 92 pounds. Or in a list of a 17-year-old's last day in Mexico before leaving for Japan, we see crazy cross-outs on a list on a paper bag. People told me there's still something very special about handwriting a list as opposed to typing it. It's one of the last places where we get to write things -- and when people write a to-do list in their own handwriting, it's like signing a contract with themselves. We feel more obligated to follow through and cross it off!

PL: Can you tell me about a time someone else's list helped you to write a list of things that you perhaps hadn't yet acknowledged?

Cagen: The whole book inspired me to write lists that I never even considered writing before....There is a whole chapter on gratitude lists where people write about reasons to live and things they love, and those are a lot of fun to read. Recurring themes are rain, friends, packages tied up in string, movies, and the feeling of fresh-cut grass. I sometimes have trouble sleeping and I found that writing lists of five things that made me happy in a given day helped me calm my brain and sleep better.

Talking with The Iceman

The Iceman cometh not, but he delivered anyway.

The great soul singer Jerry Butler, known as the Iceman for his supercool style, faithfully called in for an interview this week, even though his Saturday night show at Memorial Auditorium has been canceled. Folks there said they want Butler back next year desite slow ticket sales.

Meanwhile, his fans can still pick up this year's remastered re-release of two of Butler's classic '60s albums, "The Iceman Cometh" and "Ice on Ice." Butler, who said he's 68, was his legendarily laid-back self while recalling the days when he and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff wrote and recorded hits such as "Only the Strong Survive," "Lost" and "A Brand New Me."

"The most fun I've ever had in the music industry was working with those guys and recording songs," Butler said. "We could write three or four songs a day and most everything we wrote got recorded."

"A Brand New Me" was such a striking song that British songbird Dusty Springfield had a hit version out before Butler did. And the kicker, he said, was the version of the song Aretha Franklin put out a few years later.

"I said to Kenny and Leon, 'Man, Aretha could kill this song'," Butler recalled. "And she did just what I thought with it. She gospeled it up."

Mississippi-born Butler also collaborated with soul royalty on another occasion; he and Otis Redding wrote the classic ballad "I've Been Loving You Too Long" in a Buffalo hotel room while on tour.

"A lot of people recorded it, but nobody sang it like Otis," Butler said.