Cartee

How to organise your shopping list by aisle

A man in a supermarket aisle with a shopping cart, checking the list on his phone.

You are at the checkout, the trolley is full, and the list says milk. The milk is at the far end of the shop, where you were ten minutes ago.

Most shopping lists are written in the order things ran out: coffee, bin bags, apples, coffee filters, milk. Walk the shop in that order and you zig-zag from one end to the other. Write the list in the order of the shop instead, and you walk it once, front to back, and nothing gets left behind at the far end.

Why the order of your list matters

A list in the order of your shop does two things. You pass every item at the moment you are standing next to it, so nothing is missed. And you can see at a glance when a section is finished, so you never wonder whether you have been to the bakery yet.

It sounds like effort. It is a few minutes, once, because the sections of a shop hardly ever change. Only the items do.

How to sort a list by aisle

  1. Walk your shop in your head. Write down its sections in the order you pass them: fruit and vegetables, bread, the fridges, the tins and jars, frozen, drinks, cleaning things. Every shop is laid out a little differently, so use yours, not a generic one.
  2. Give every item a section. Instead of one long column, put each item under the section where it lives. The apples go under fruit and vegetables, whenever you happen to remember them.
  3. Keep the sections, change the items. Next week the sections stay in the same order and only the items under them change. You set the order once.
  4. Leave frozen and chilled until last. If your shop allows it, put them at the end of the route so they spend the least time in the trolley.
  5. One list per shop. If you go to two shops with different layouts, give each its own list in its own order. The hardware store does not need a bakery.

When the shop moves things around

Shops rearrange. When yours does, move the section, not every item. The items follow their section to its new place in the list.

Setting it up in Cartee

In Cartee, the sections are called categories, and every list has its own. A new list starts with four: Food, Drinks, Home and Other. Rename them, add your own and delete the ones you do not need, until they match your shop.

  1. Open the list’s settings, then Categories.
  2. Hold a category and drag it into place, in the order you walk your shop. Your list follows that order automatically.
  3. Choose a category when you add an item. It lands in its section, in the right place on the list.

Your open items now read top to bottom in the order you walk the shop, and ticked items move out of the way as you go. If you want one item somewhere else, drag it there. On a list you share, the order belongs to the list, so everyone who shops from it walks the same route.

The short version

Write down the sections of your shop in the order you pass them, put every item under its section, and keep that order from week to week. You will walk the shop once, and the milk will be in the trolley before you reach the checkout.