There are a few things that tend to get me pretty riled up. One of them is the perception of checklists as a sign of weakness, as a sign of an inability to remember things, as a sign of over complication..
And every time I find myself getting riled up, I remind myself of the brilliant quote by surgeon Atul Gawande in his brilliant piece of work ‘The Checklist Manifesto’.
“We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment, It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us — those we aspire to be — handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.” — Atul Gawande
I’ve been using checklists pretty intensively for many years now and it comes with the package of being a self confessed productivity ‘geek‘. In fact, it has even inspired me to egg a more technically adept friend to spend some time developing a checklist app for the iPhone with me taking the respectable position of cheerleader for the moment. We’re targeting an August 15th release date. Let’s hope that happens!
While it does sound like I am on some weird checklist crusade (with the slogan being ‘checklists are NOT a sign of weakness, but a sign of power!), the simple truth about checklists is that they work. And, more often than not, they help create bandwidth when most required.
A Learning a Day 