[edosaurus_rex]

All,
I adopted the "list approach" several years ago and it has been a great benefit.
I did much the same thing as you; come up with 490 objects from the NGC/IC and Messier lists, but I put them in an Excel spreadsheet and I have a column that calculates the transit time of each object for any observing day that I input. I then sort by transit time of those I haven't seen and print the list that I take to the site. The printout has a space for some brief notes for each object (mine usually say "WOW keep coming back to this one!"

I have a list of 306 double/multiple stars as well. Mine is hijacked from a LX200? list of doubles I found online (filtered to 0.7 arcsec min for my 6" scope) and the Astronomical League's Doubles Club list of 100 pairs/multiples.

Doubles are like a Safari when you are hunting the very close ones near the scope's resolution limit. Very still air is needed to split the close pairings so on some nights you "miss" some of the targets because of bad air. I'm 2/3 of the way through and I can see a lot of 0.7, 0.8, and 0.9 splits stacking up at the end.

Ed