How to make the most of your Checklists

A few days back I posted this post about the power of checklists and promised that the next day I would post about how to make the most of your checklists. I didn’t as I got carried away with some other ideas. But today, we return to checklists. Checklists ARE powerful tools but only if we actually harness that power. So today, I give you a few tips on how to make the most of your checklists.

Firstly, you need to work out what the checklist is for. The way I look at this, every checklist will serve some combination of 3 purposes.

1. To help you get the hang of a process you need to follow in the short term. An example here would be the checklist I created for processing each and every email in my inbox.
2. To serve as a base for you to amend each time you use it to meet the current need. An example here would be a packing list as every trip will have different needs, but having a base list is really helpful.
3. To make 100% certain that when following a complex process, you do not miss anything. The most well known examples of this would be the lists that Aviation Engineers and Pilots go through to make sure everything is good to go before take off.

Checklists that you create for each of these occasions are very powerful but the best ways to harness that power will be different.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash