How Checklists Outperform To-Do Lists (PLUS: Downloadable Template)

“The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.”

― Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

They’re not exciting. They’re not interesting. They’re not fun.

Checklists are the invisible lubricants of business, health and professional sports. Every day they push people on with their day and act as the teeth of cogs slowly but steadily turning wheels.

Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, said he was inspired to research and write how professional organisations use checklists, after reading the story of a young girl who fell into a frozen pond and discovering that the physician that saved her relied heavily on checklists. His book highlights their power. From gigantic companies such as Apple, to heart surgeons and professional football teams, world class experts count on checklists as their secret weapon.

In this article I want to show you how I use checklists to power through my day.

Checklists are NOT to-do lists

Let’s get something clear: Checklists are not  to-do lists.

To-do lists are blank pages with no end. You fill them up from top to bottom without priority, focus and limit.

Checklists are processes. Think of them like computer programs (side note – learn programming with this fun game). They have an input and an output. Consistent, regular, predictable.

Checklists can increase productivity when:

• It’s a task you do more than once: i.e. it’s repeated.
• The task has multiple, consistent steps.

To-do lists are good when:

• It’s a task you will only ever do once e.g. a travel itinerary
• The output can be multiple values e.g. ‘paint a picture’

If you have a job, chances are you do pretty much the same thing most days. Or at least one day a week.

For suit tailoring, I did all my administrative work on a Monday. Processing new orders, dealing with customer enquiries, collecting payments, invoicing, expenses, emails, preparing suits for the week, booking appointments, chasing orders, a team meeting, organising colleagues for their own weeks, getting deliveries ready, ordering in cloth etc. etc. All of it always done on a Monday.

The problem with empty to-do lists

To-do lists have a fundamental problem: They lack structure.

You come into work with a nice empty to-do list. Hoorah!

Then you go to a meeting. Things get added to your list. Then someone comes to your desk and gives you all of their own work. More added to your list. Then a client calls and asks for everything you did last week to be undone. Even more added to your list… Now you’re out of space.

To-do lists lack PFL: Priority, Focus and Limit.

Tom’s Checklist

You should create a customised checklist for your own working procedure. A template.

Here’s a video explaining my own checklist:

I’ve created a template you can download and edit.

Download Tom's Checklist

Priority

What this checklist does is systematise your working day into a procedure. The first thing on your checklist should be the most important – and also the task that shapes or starts any secondary tasks. You don’t want to have to go backwards.

For instance, my most important task is to go through all the appointments I saw last week and make sure all the orders have been processed, notes recorded and payments processed.

By having your own custom checklist you ensure that you set the priority for your day.

Focus

Systematised checklists are like laser-guided to-do lists. There’s no waffle. You do each task until it’s done. Batched in one go.

Emails, for example, I do them all at once. Using templates, delay send techniques, and keyboard shortcuts, I can reply to 100 emails in 10-15 minutes.

The same goes for each task on my list. There’s no stopping and starting. Lunch can wait until it’s done.

Limit

To-do lists look wonderful when they’re blank spaces. But you just want to fill them in.

I remember when I worked at a corporate communications agency before suit tailoring, we had these long green and yellow to-do list books, 32 lines long (I like counting).

You just wanted to fill it in. The lines looked so lonely… No, I’m bullshitting. You wanted to fill them in because if you didn’t, people would come over to your desk, look at your list and if it wasn’t full give you more work to do. Hence the busyness culture of the workplace.

Creating your own template checklist stops all of that. It provides limit.

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Can you beat 30% time saving?

To give you an idea of how much time you can save with checklists – and to propose a challenge – in my first year of suit tailoring I’d get to York (from London) at 10AM (it’s a 2 hour train journey), and leave at 7PM. That’s a total of 9 hours.

In my second year, with the introduction of the checklist, I started at 10AM and left at 4PM. That’s a total of 6 hours. 30% efficiency increase. The total amount of work I was doing had actually increased, but the time I was doing it decreased.

I’d be interested to see how much time you can save with a customised checklist, so please download it and try it out for a month.

Download Tom's Checklist

Let me know how you get on!

Actions

• Download Tom’s Checklist
• Customise it to your own work procedure (it’s in Microsoft Word format)
• Print a dozen or so copies
• Stick to them for a month. Tweak if you find you missed a component
• Let me know in the comments your time efficiency improvement!

Image: Yorkshire Dales by Alan Bloom via Flickr. I like to save time to see more of this.