The solution to some of the world’s most complex problems is actually really simple. Engineers use it to build skyscrapers, surgeons use it to save lives and it allows pilots to fly hundreds of passengers safely, everyday.
It’s a checklist !
Breathtaking and suffocating level of complexity requires a system to handle it. A checklist is a surprisingly simple tool that helps. I became fascinated with checklists when I read, The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, during the covid lockdown in 2020.
It all started when the World Health Organization (WHO) approached Dr. Atul Gawande with a project to reduce deaths during surgery.
The solution, was a nineteen-items checklist, which took roughly 2 mins to follow through. This checklist was circulated to 8 hospitals across the world, including a few hospitals in the rural areas as well. The result was a 35% decrease in complications during surgery and a 47% decrease in the death rate.
”This was bigger than any drug”, Dr. Gawande said, in one of his famous Ted TALK.
The brain is good for having ideas but a bad place for storing things. The checklist relieves the mind form the task of remembering things to do. It is a list of actionable items that are to be performed in a given sequence which helps in simplifying complex processes as it allows it’s users to focus on the items of the checklist, one at a time.
The Checklist, because of it’s simplicity can be used anywhere. You can use it, the next time you are packing for a trip, so you don’t forget your toothbrush (again), or forget to charge your Bluetooth earphones before your flight.
The checklist can be used in any scenario that involves a repetitive process. A handy list of all the important things you need to follow, makes your life a lot easier. It eliminates the chances of accidentally skipping over a step in a process.
The process of creating your own checklist involves three simple steps.
- Observe your process.
- Record your process and
- Refine your process.
As silly as it may sound, but I follow a checklist before joining a Zoom Video Call. The objective is to make sure I don’t forget to charge my laptop and earphones, to make sure my background is clean, to enable microphone volume and adjust sound settings and to have a notepad and a pen on my table so I don’t have to pause my video to go grab them in the middle of a meeting.
