In order for the system to work, you must check and update it every day. If you forget to empty the daily file, you won’t trust the system to handle important data, and you’ll have to manage those things some other way. If you leave town (or don’t access the file on the weekend), you must be sure to check the folders for the days you’ll be away, before you go.
Checklists: Creative and Constructive Reminders
The last topic in personal system organization that deserves some attention is the care and feeding of checklists, those “recipes of potential ingredients” for projects, work processes and procedures, events, and areas of value, interest, and responsibility. In essence, any of the lists or categories of reminders we’ve already discussed are checklists, in that they serve the function of providing things to check or review to ensure that you’re not missing something in that area. The more common idea of checklists, however, refers to a listing of the contents of a topic, procedure, or some arena of interest or activity, to be utilized either at a specific time or whenever you engage in a particular kind of activity. These can range from big-picture outlines of areas of focus in your job or your life down to the detailed instructions of how to load pictures onto a Web site.
Many years ago Alfred North Whitehead cogently observed, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” Checklists provide the micro version of that macro observation: whenever you have to think about anything, either because of some regularity of a refreshed view (“At the end of every calendar year, I want/need to . . .”) or a specific situation that requires more detail than you can easily recall (“Before I deliver a seminar, I need to . . .”), you should entrust those jobs to your “external mind”—your management system that holds the details you need to engage with at appropriate times.*
There are an infinite number of possible checklists that allow you to have more relaxed control in various situations across your life and work. If you ever refer to a recipe in a cookbook in order to prepare a specific dish, you’re using a checklist to boost your focus and productivity. If your board has tasked you with three key initiatives or outcomes for the year, reviewing those prior to your board meeting would be utilizing a checklist.
Because I am describing the process of clarifying and organizing what may be on your mind, to begin to implement this system I’ll focus on a common set of topics that emerge for people, for which checklists are often the best solution.
Things You Want to Pay Attention To
Often, when we are working with people to clear up what is on their minds, what shows up are things like this:
What should you do with these “fuzzier” kinds of internal commitments and areas of attention?
First, Identify Inherent Projects and Action
For much of this kind of stuff, there is still a project and/or an action that needs to be defined. “Exercise more regularly” really translates for many people into “Set up regular exercise program” (project) and “Call Sally for suggestion about gyms and personal trainers” (real action step). In such cases, inherent projects and actions still need to be clarified and organized into a personal system. Or “Maintain good morale on my team” should become a project (“Explore team-building processes for my department”) with a specific action step (“E-mail our HR director to get her input on this opportunity”).
But there are some things that don’t quite fit into that category, and often, appropriate checklists are needed to address them.
Blueprinting Key Areas of Work and Accountability
Objectives like “Maintain good physical conditioning” or “Keep my team motivated” may still need to be built into some sort of overview checklist that will be reviewed regularly. You have multiple layers of outcomes and standards playing on your psyche and your choices at any point in time, and knowing what those are, at all the different levels, is always a good idea (and yet not so easy to habitually maintain and adhere to).
I suggested earlier that there are at least six levels of your “work” that could be defined and that each level deserves its own acknowledgment and evaluation. A complete inventory of everything you hold important and are committed to on each of these levels would represent an awesome checklist. It might include:
And then moving down a level, within your job, you might want some reminders of your key areas of responsibility, your staff, your values, and so on. A list of these might contain points like:
All of these items could in turn be included on the lists in your personal system, as reminders to you, as needed, to keep the ship on course, on an even keel. Many times the value is simply to affirm that the specific area is OK as is; nothing needs to be added or changed. But knowing that adds to your relaxed focus.
The More Novel the Situation, the More Control Required
The degree to which any of us needs to maintain checklists and external controls is directly related to our unfamiliarity with the area of responsibility. If you’ve been doing what you’re doing for a long time, and there’s no pressure on you to change in that area, you probably need minimal external personal organization to stay on cruise control. You know when things must happen and how to make them happen, and your system is fine, status quo. You could manage those in your sleep. Often, though, that’s not the case.
Did you ever have to go through some prescribed procedure to manage a discrete kind of financial transaction, log in and refresh a software application, or even go through several necessary steps to check in to a friend’s vacation cabin, and you had the experience of asking yourself, “Wait a minute, what do I need to do, now?” In any of those situations you may want or need to repeat, you need a checklist. I am dangerously semiliterate in terms of computers and software, and whenever I get instruction from our IT experts about how to fix some recurring glitch, it is easy to convince myself I will remember what they told me. I have learned (too many times the hard way) to create checklists for them.
Many times you’ll want some sort of checklist to help you maintain a focus until you’re more familiar with what you’re doing. If your CEO suddenly disappeared, for example, and you instantly had to fill her shoes, you’d need some overview and outlines in front of you for a while to ensure that you had all the mission-critical aspects of the job handled. And if you’ve just been hired into a new position, with new responsibilities that are relatively unfamiliar to you, you’ll want a framework of control and structure, if only for the first few months. As we have instituted a novel organizational structure and operating system in our company, we have been using many critical checklists to support our meeting practices for its implementation, until they become automatic.
There have been times when I needed to make a list of areas that I had to handle temporarily, until things were under control. For instance, when my wife and I decided to create a brand-new structure for a business we’d been involved with for many years, I took on areas of responsibility I’d never had to deal with before—namely, accounting, computers, marketing, legal, and administration. For several months I needed to keep a checklist of those responsibilities in front of me to ensure that I filled in the blanks everywhere and managed the transition as well as I could. After the business got onto “cruise control” to some degree, I no longer needed that list.