I recently read this book, The Checklist Manifesto, and I have to say I love the message of the book and a lot of the info in it.

I realize the Agile Manifesto preaches “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, but quite honestly, I read that to mean that processes and tools shouldn’t exist for themselves. They should exist exclusively in service to people.

I felt like the book made me parse it too much in order find out how you should actually practice making good checklists. For the most part, the book focuses on why you should use checklists. I think this is important to impress on people, but you don’t need the majority of the book to do so. I can do it in short order.

Why you need checklists

Let me break down the argument of the book here very quickly to one sentence: you need to use checklists in your field if you (1) have routine tasks that (2) when not done can (3) cause great harm.

So the most important thing for you to do is to determine now whether you should even be reading the rest of what I have to say.

I’m going to take the first two items for granted as occurring in most jobs. So really, we need to ask about harm: is there stuff that if you didn’t do it would cause loss of life, limb, money, property, or something else?

If you can think of something, great. Then the rest of this for you. If you can’t think of anything, because you think most of what you do really doesn’t matter, I’ll accept it, but there is usually something we’re overlooking still.

For example, many people think of fast food as the lowest possible job in existence, but if fast food workers neglect to do certain things, then people can get sick.

An alarm goes off every hour in every Chipotle restaurant, to remind workers to wash their hands and put on new latex gloves. But three former managers, who asked to remain anonymous to speak openly about their former employer, said the alarm was often ignored when the restaurants were busy. — Bloomberg, Inside Chipotle’s Contamination Crisis on Chipotle

Suffice to say, I really do agree with the premise of the book that everyone needs checklists.

Anatomy of a checklist

The book goes into a lot of detail in a bunch of different places about what good checklists do. I’m taking some liberties with the details, but the basic thrust is that good checklists contain:

1. Items that if you miss, they’ll kill you

2. Items that you say a definite yes or no to

3. Items with very terse wording. Maybe 9 words at max

4. Groupings of small sets of items, no more than 5 to 7 per set, that go together in someway

5. A date last revised

That’s it. Those are the qualifications.

Pitfalls with checklists

The book doesn’t go into this specifically, but I’m going to because I think it’s important.

When they get out of date. Regardless I’d guess it’s one of the most important pieces that gets overlooked is the date last revised. People don’t want feel like revisiting it because the process changes too much or because they don’t want another thing to do on a regular basis. Both feelings are understandable, but honestly, those are excuses, not reasons.

When they’re for everything in utter detail. Checklists shouldn’t be how-to guides or tutorials. They’re meant for people who already know what they’re doing. These lists need to cover the stuff that kills you and no more than that. If there’s a lot of things that can kill you, then you need to prioritize and then stop at a certain point.