More checklist goodness.

February 02nd, 2009

A while back we discussed Dr. Peter Pronovost and his use of simple checklists to improve, often radically, patient care in hospitals.

These two posts on using checklists showed up in my RSS feeds over the past week:

1. From Dave Stein’s Commentary on Sales Leadership blog: Checklists: For Surgeons, Pilots and . . . Salespeople

ESR estimates that 80% of sales opportunities are lost due to either ineffective qualification or ineffective planning. Every sales plan I’ve ever written has had a checklist. What’s a sales plan without a list of events, activities, calls, meetings, and tactics — a checklist?

(Dave also includes a link to a sales checklist of his own device.)

2. From the Signal vs. Noise blog at 37signals: Verify your work with checklists

It’s the kind of stuff that we all know, but that we’ll often forget if we’re not being reminded about it in the moment. Thinking back to the mistakes we’ve made in the past, there are plenty of those that could have been avoided or caught much earlier if we had been using checklists.

These posts have led me to revise my own daily checklist, which I use to make sure that I cover all the bases of my job without lingering too long on any one task.

Are you using checklists?
If so, how do they benefit you?
If not, what’s keeping you from it?

~

Image by Eugene Peretz, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
Category: Productivity

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3 Comments so far

Michael February 3rd, 2009 10:05 am

I’m a big fan of checklists – sometimes to a fault. The troubling thing for me is that they never seem to end. They just keep growing, with no end in sight.

Tim Walker February 3rd, 2009 11:31 am

I hear you, Michael. But I have a question: are you talking about checklists, or to-do lists?

Checklists, at least as used by Dr. Pronovost, are limited sets of do-every-time tasks related to, for instance, preparing a patient for a surgical procedure. Like a pilot’s pre-flight checklist (see Stein’s post referenced above), they don’t change much over time, but rather remind you to cover the bases *every* time.

Rusty Fincke February 3rd, 2009 12:25 pm

I have checklists and to-do lists. Sometimes I write things I have already done or checked, just to check them off. (or in my case, fill them in – I make squares I can fill in)

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