How to Use Simple Checklists to Improve Efficiency and Reduce Errors
When you have a strenuous job like a doctor or a pilot, you perform challenging tasks every day with very high success rates. How do such professionals even start working when the task can be so overwhelming? One tool that helps them manage their work is a humble checklist.
This post originally appeared on the Zapier blog .
Even if you’ve read a disturbing story about failed medical procedures, you still make an appointment with your doctor for medical treatment. You, too, go with confidence in the belief that your doctor is right when it comes to your case. But doctors are wrong. Nurses too. Even the best medical professionals in their field make mistakes.
These failures, according to Atul Gawande, MD , author of the Checklist Manifesto , stem from the incredibly complex nature of the doctors’ work. It’s the same with engineers, lawyers and pilots: anyone who has to carry a huge amount of knowledge and experience with them and apply it effectively is sometimes prone to make mistakes.
“We have accumulated tremendous know-how,” writes Gawande in his book. “We’ve put it into the hands of some of the most trained, highly skilled and hardworking people in our society. And with his help, they really achieved outstanding results. However, this know-how is often unmanageable. “
As more of us take on the role of knowledge workers, when our livelihoods depend on collecting, interpreting and applying vast amounts of information, we become more prone to making the same mistakes. There are so many things that we can carry in our heads without forgetting anything.
Gawande believes the answer to this problem is to use checklists. Yes, a simple little checklist can save lives and prevent buildings from collapsing. It can improve your work and save you time. This top physician even has evidence to back it up.
Why checklists are so effective
In his Manifesto Checklist, Gawande tells the story of a patient treated by a friend, a doctor in San Francisco. One night, a patient came to the emergency room stabbed at a Halloween party. Doctors and nurses carefully examined the patient and ordered surgery.
Everything looked good until the patient stopped responding and his heart rate increased dramatically. The patient’s blood pressure was practically not determined. His medical team hadn’t improved him in any way, so he was rushed into surgery. It was only when it was opened that the doctor finally realized that the stab and cut wound had gone much deeper inside the patient than he had thought, cutting through the aorta, the main artery leading from the heart. Although it looked like a minor stab wound, the patient was actually wounded with a bayonet – part of the attacker’s costume.
“Your mind doesn’t think about the bayonet in San Francisco,” Gawande later heard from his friend. Asking about the weapon used is a normal practice – this time it was simply overlooked.
If the checklist had been followed, the patient would not have been left in the emergency room awaiting surgery for a small stab wound, but would have been sent to surgery immediately when his doctors realized how deep his wound was.
Checklists seem simple, says Gawande, and we sometimes find it difficult to accept them as a necessity when we are doing important work that relies on our skills and knowledge. But humility through a checklist can improve our work and help us achieve more sustainable results. “They remind us of the minimum steps needed and make them explicit,” writes Gawande. “They not only offer verification capabilities, but they also instill a kind of discipline for higher performance.”
In 2009, Gawande presented a list of surgical procedures for doctors and nurses under a program developed by the World Health Organization. The checklist has been designed to ensure that basic checks are always performed prior to surgery. Go through the list and you will make sure that everyone is aware of the upcoming surgery, knows who else was on the surgical team, and knows their role in the procedure.
Although Gawande admits that he did not expect the checklist to make a big difference in his own operations, he followed it to avoid hypocrisy and was surprised by the results. The checklist saved lives on at least one occasion in which Gawande’s error resulted in a critical need for blood while the error was corrected. Thanks to the checklist, the extra blood was prepared in advance, despite Gawande’s confidence that he would be able to successfully perform the operation he had done many times before.
In other cases, the checklist ensured that allergy sufferers were not given drugs that could cause a reaction, which in most cases would have been given as a matter of course. This also prevented anesthetic errors as everyone knew the special requirements prior to surgery.
The checklist worked. This saved lives, provided the best possible results, and kept Gawande’s surgeon team at the ready every time.
“It’s tempting to believe that no one’s work can be as difficult as mine,” writes Gounde. “But extreme complexity is the rule for almost everyone.” Your job may not have life or death consequences, but you will get the same benefits if you use a checklist to organize your most important tasks.
Using checklists in the workplace
Before creating checklists, it is helpful to know what a good checklist consists of. After all, you want it to be useful and save you time in the long run.
Creating a unique checklist for yourself is an important place to start as it gives you ownership of the process. In Gawande’s program, doctors were forced to use his surgical checklist by the hospital administration or the head of surgery, which often looked like an invasion.
“Checking the boxes here is not the end goal,” says Gawande. Rather, the goal is to embrace a “culture of teamwork and discipline.” Using the primary checklist as a basis can be helpful, but then teams need to customize it to suit their exact workflow.
Creating your own checklist also means you can use it in your work and refine based on the results.
Gawande says a good checklist is accurate, effective, and easy to use, even in the most challenging situations. It should only remind you of the most important steps, not try to detail everything – after all, a checklist cannot do your job for you. And above all, the checklist should be practical.
Your own role and the company you work for will determine which checklists help you the most. Generally, a checklist is best for frequently repetitive work in a predictable order.
An example from my own work is the process of creating a new blog post. While I usually remember the content creation steps because they are part of my writing process – writing a plan, researching, drafting, and editing – there are many other steps that I can easily forget. Adding images, working with multiple caption options to find the best one, and validating image captions are all common tasks that can be easily overlooked.
Content promotion can also be a repetitive process with many steps that are easy to forget about. My content promotion checklist will include posting a post to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, sending it to everyone in the content, and telling the author (if not me) to know the content has been posted.
I’m sure you can think of many other areas of your work in which you could use checklists. Here are a few more ideas you might find useful:
- Networking: Chat with new people you meet, add them to your contact list, follow them on social media, and more.
- Administrator: filling out reports, backing up important files and other tedious tasks that are not part of your daily work.
- Financial: Tasks such as reporting taxes, scanning receipts, and checking expenses.
- Household: Household chores that need to be done individually or jointly.
- Security: list of accounts, passwords change regularly, and backups to check (if you need backups more than once, when you want to understand that it has stopped working)
Checklist tools for a quick start
Rather than relying on pen and paper to create a checklist, there are dozens of apps and templates available for a quick start. Use the app to build your checklist, then you can duplicate it each time for quick review. Here are some great options – and remember that even your to-do list app can often be a great place to put together a simple checklist.
Checklist (iOS, Android, Web)
Checklist makes it easy to get started with checklists with a built-in repository of user-submitted checklists that you can view and use. Here you can find listings for just about everything from SEO to property checks and camping. Add the lists you want to your account, or create your own checklists from scratch, and you can start organizing your workflows without much hassle.
Checkvist (Internet)
If you love writing in Markdown and using keyboard shortcuts, Checkvist is for you. It is a web application that allows you to create checklists that you can print or share with others, and even set up daily reports. If you need collaborative checklist management or need a checklist that integrates with your favorite services like Evernote, give Checkvist a try.
Tallifi (Internet)
If your business needs checklists for different tasks or departments, Tallyfy may be the best solution. It allows you to create basic checklists that act like templates. You can then create a “run” or an instance of this master checklist with its own name. Each run can be tracked so you can see how your checklists are progressing and you can run multiple runs of the same master checklist at the same time. You can also invite your team to work on the checklist, making it easier to manage team processes.
Explicitly (Internet)
Manifestly is another team oriented checklist tool. It includes comments and @mentions so you can discuss the checklist with your teammates as you work on it. It also has a built-in reporting system to see how long it takes to complete checklists, which ones are used and by whom.
Checkli (Internet)
Checkli – it really is a simple, free personal version, which you should choose. It allows you to create checklists, download them in PDF formats, and share read-only versions. There are no frills or extra features – there are enough to help you organize your tasks.
Pocket Lists (iOS)
Checklists don’t have to be boring. Pocket Lists is a fun iOS personal checklist that lets you organize your checklists with icons. Organize the things you need to get done, then add an icon to each checklist for easier identification. It can manage your day to day tasks with due dates and notifications, and it can track your more detailed checklists to help with your work procedures.
Wunderlist (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Web)
This is primarily a to-do list app, but Wunderlist can also be a great tool for creating checklists. It’s free, works on almost all devices, and is incredibly easy to use. You cannot duplicate lists, but you can create a list and share it with a public list. Anyone – on your team or around the world – can then add the list to their account, check off items, and then add it again when needed. This is a workaround that can save you the need for a new app just for making checklists.
OmniOutliner (iOS, Mac)
OmniOutliner is a popular tool for creating paths and simple tables, but it – or any other pathing application – can also be useful for making checklists. Write down the elements you need to do, drag and drop them in the order you want, and then share your schematic file with others in HTML or PDF format so they can view the list on any device.
Microsoft Word, OneNote, Evernote, and just about any other note-taking or writing application can also be used to create basic checklists. They may not have many checklist related features, but they are easy to use and convenient on just about any computer.
WorkFlowy (iOS, Android, Internet)
Paid as a notepad for lists, WorkFlowy is an app for managing all of your checklists. Everything is listed on one sheet where you will keep all your separate lists and sublists in order. Select a bullet to focus on a specific sublist, or the minus button on the left to collapse the list. This makes it easy to write long checklists while still being able to focus only on the tasks you need to get done right now.
Have you made a checklist? Now rely on it.
Your job desperately needs a checklist, but if your first checklist doesn’t survive, don’t despair. Like elaborate plans, checklists – at least the first sketches – often don’t work in the real world. Even aviation and surgical checklists are constantly being modified to make them easier to use, clearer, and more useful in real life situations.
Accepting the fallibility of our memories and the sheer amount of information that we need to process and apply in our work is an important first step. Realize, as Gawande wrote, that “knowledge both saved and burdened us,” and realize that a checklist can ensure that your brain never lets you down. Then you’ll be ready to create and rely on a checklist to help you perform better and more consistently.
How to Use Simple Checklists to Improve Efficiency and Reduce Errors | Zapier