The Power of checklists – thebudgetnistablog.com
Happy Friday! TGIF!
Do you find yourself competing projects and forgetting to add an important detail or two? Do you usually stare at your review in disbelief, saying things like “I can’t believe I forgot that”? Are you a top performer but could be even more successful if your work were 100% thorough? Well, you may be in need of a checklist or two…
I found myself asking myself the same questions at work, as I challenged myself to submit impeccable work constantly. However, with mounting pressures at work, endless distractions here and there, and work hours that never seem enough to do it all, it was easier said than done. That’s when I got in the habit of using checklists to vet my work, and even making up my own to ensure optimal results, regardless of the assignment, task or project.
In his best-seller The Checklist Manifesto, surgeon and checklist advocate, reveals to us that despite the incredible wealth of knowledge and possibility available to us today, we keep committing avoidable failures that constantly set us back, across all major fields and industries, as well as in real, simple and usually quite disorganized life. In his book, Mr. Gawande explains that the simplest of tools can actually render us more effective: the checklist. So how can we incorporate checklists into our professional lives more effectively?
1. Use a comprehensive checklist! If you are using a checklist template from work, ensure that it covers all the most essential aspects of the project or task at hand. If you happen to be building your own checklist, as you probably will have to, sit back and take a critical look at it to make sure that it provides 360 degree view of the process it is undertaking to cover.
2. Don’t make it too short! An effective checklist is not pages long, as it would not only waster your precious time, but take your concentration off the very purpose of it. Yet, it shouldn’t be too short either, as it may fail capturing important details of the process that may create, once again, those “avoidable failures”.
3. Selection, selection, selection! A good checklist is not a laundry list of anything and everything that could affect a project, process or task. Rather, it is a selective list of what could go wrong. Ask yourself what are the most critical culprits of the task at hand, and if those are no listed on your checklist, then you may want to reconsider…
As a bonus, we are attaching our basic project checklist…just for you:
Are you using checklists in your work?
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