I wish I could upvote this comment an extra time. Atul Gawande’s article is great, and applying it to personal life seems highly worth experimenting with. I’d love to hear results from personal experiments with checklists.
I use checklists for website maintenance—I have lists of things that need to go up or change with each update. I find that when I remember to use the checklist, I’m usually paying enough attention that I’ve already remembered everything on it; it’s when I’m doing a sloppy enough job to forget my checklist that it would have been most helpful.
I’ve used spaced repetition to memorize checklists for things for me to do in certain situations and found it to be quite useful. Some of my thinking on this was inspired by The Checklist Manifesto, which I read recently. I’m still figuring out how to make my system work better and have it cover more situations, but an example of one checklist that I’ve gotten a bit of mileage out of is the one I’ve made for accessing my inner anticipation controller.
I use todoist.com to maintain a variety of checklists, from daily and the14thofeachmonth to one time next year, divided into different areas of growth (health, career, science knowledge, social/family, etc.) and non-growth-but-needs-to-be-done.
It has markedly increased my productivity on both small goals and larger life goals, and also stopped 95% of my “oh I was busy with X, so I forgot about you asking me to do Y” that used to happen to me quite a bit at home and at work.
I wish I could upvote this comment an extra time. Atul Gawande’s article is great, and applying it to personal life seems highly worth experimenting with. I’d love to hear results from personal experiments with checklists.
I use checklists for website maintenance—I have lists of things that need to go up or change with each update. I find that when I remember to use the checklist, I’m usually paying enough attention that I’ve already remembered everything on it; it’s when I’m doing a sloppy enough job to forget my checklist that it would have been most helpful.
I’ve used spaced repetition to memorize checklists for things for me to do in certain situations and found it to be quite useful. Some of my thinking on this was inspired by The Checklist Manifesto, which I read recently. I’m still figuring out how to make my system work better and have it cover more situations, but an example of one checklist that I’ve gotten a bit of mileage out of is the one I’ve made for accessing my inner anticipation controller.
I use todoist.com to maintain a variety of checklists, from daily and the14thofeachmonth to one time next year, divided into different areas of growth (health, career, science knowledge, social/family, etc.) and non-growth-but-needs-to-be-done.
It has markedly increased my productivity on both small goals and larger life goals, and also stopped 95% of my “oh I was busy with X, so I forgot about you asking me to do Y” that used to happen to me quite a bit at home and at work.