I have a list that is indexed like the following: >list.stuff [[1]] [[1]]$vector ... [[1]]$matrix .... [[1]]$vector [[2]] null [[3]] [[3]]$vector ... [[3]]$matrix .... [[3]]$vector . . . Each segment in the list is indexed according to another vector of indexes: >index.list 1, 3, 5, 10, 15 In list.stuff, only at each of the indexes 1,3,5,10,15 will there be 2 vectors and one matrix; everything else will be null like [[2]]. What I want to do is to lag like the lag.xts function so that whatever is stored in [[1]] will be pushed to [[3]] and the last one drops off. This also requires subsetting the list, if its possible. I was wondering if there exists some functions that handle list manipulation. My thinking is that for xts, a time series can be extracted based on an index you supply: xts.object[index,] #returns the rows 1,3,5,10,15 From here I can lag it with: lag.xts(xts.object[index,]) Any help would be appreciated thanks: EDIT: Here is a reproducible example: list.stuff<-list() vec<-c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) vec2<-c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) mat<-matrix(c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8),4,2) list.vec.mat<-list(vec=vec,mat=mat,vec2=vec2) ind<-c(2,4,6,8,10) for(i in ind){ list.stuff[[i]]<-list.vec.mat }