Don’t be embarrassed if your fond of creating checklists. Doing so is a part of establishing your own system.
Checklist has been used to save lives during surgery before. According to Dr. Atul Gawande, when the checklist was implemented during surgeries across eight hospitals in the world, the average complication rate fell to 36% while death cases slowed down to 50% in every hospitals.
Moreover, even pilots create checklist to handle different situations such as crashing planes, stressful and chaotic incidents.
Greg McKeown, author of the book Essentialism, noted that you need a system in handling complexities. And that system is called the checklist.
Creating checklists is one way to prepare yourself on handling complex things. People may find it really simple on doing checklists but they tend to underestimate its purpose.
The same solution used by pilots and doctors can also be utilized in maximizing your productivity.
The importance of creating checklists
Greg McKeown discussed in one of the vlogs of Matt D’ Avella that checklist reliefs the mind of the things that it tries to remember constantly. Checklist helps the mind to declutter things that aren’t significant to remember.
Doing a checklist is setting-up a system that will significantly improve your efficiency in doing things.
To help you improve your productivity, here are the checklist on creating a checklist:
1. Observe your process
Create a time-lapse of your own process
2. Record your process
Write your process as you remember it. Once you’ve done recording it, do the process once again.
3.Refine your process
After doing the process again, assess if that process works for you. If not, refine your process until you can finally say that “it is how I will do it right now”.
4. Teach your process to others
Mentor other people on how you effectively get the right things done everyday.
Checklist is essential because it helps human to increase execution especially on complexities.
As Matt stated in his video, checklist helped him identified which areas of his daily habits are repetitive, slowing his own progress, and aren’t working for him.
At the end of the day, checklist taught people to consider essential things. Learn to remove obstacles in order to execute easily.
With the system of checklist, you will feel that you are in control and you get the right things done.
