Stop using bullet points. Number your lists.

Every day, somewhere in a Slack message, an email, or a doc, someone writes a list of points with little round bullets in front of them. And every day, somewhere else, someone replies: "Wait, which one are you talking about — the second one or the third?"

This is a small problem that compounds into a large one. There's a fix, and it has existed since at least the ancient Greeks: number your lists.

The case in two screenshots

❌ Bullet points
✅ Numbers
  1. Buy milk
  2. Ship the deploy
  3. Reply to Erin
  4. Pick up the kids

Same content. But now look what becomes possible in the right column:

"Can we swap 2 and 4? I want to handle the school run before the deploy goes out." — a coworker who can finally be specific

With bullets, that same person has to say: "the deploy one and the kids one", or worse, paste the items back at you. Numbers turn lists into addresses. Bullets are anonymous.

Why numbers win

  1. You can reference them. "See point 3" is a complete sentence. "See the third bullet" is an apology in disguise.
  2. You can count them. A glance tells you there are seven things. With bullets you do the counting yourself, every time.
  3. They imply priority. The top of a numbered list is the most important. The top of a bulleted list is just whatever you typed first.
  4. They survive being quoted. Paste a numbered list into a reply and the numbers come with it. Bullet characters break, indent wrong, or get stripped entirely.
  5. They make people finish. A list that goes 1, 2, 3 invites a 4. A list of bullets feels done at any length, including the wrong one.

"But my list isn't ordered."

Neither is your grocery list. Number it anyway. You're not ranking the items — you're indexing them, so other humans can point at them. Ordering and indexing are different jobs.

The mental model: if a person might ever say "the second one" about your list, number it.

The actual exceptions

Use bullets when the list is decorative (a sidebar of features on a marketing page), the items aren't sentences, or there are exactly two and counting them is silly. Everywhere else — meeting agendas, action items, options to choose from, steps, requirements, talking points — number them.

How to start

  1. In Slack, type 1. at the start of a line. Slack auto-converts it. Same for Google Docs, Notion, most email clients, and any decent Markdown renderer.
  2. If you catch yourself reaching for a hyphen, stop. That hyphen is about to become a bullet. Make it a number instead.
  3. Send your colleagues this site. That's what it's for.

Spotted a bullet list in the wild? Reply with a link.

Copied. Go forth and enumerate.