Check it More Than Twice

Santa has it right. You make a list. You check it. A lot.

How people don't use something like Trello to keep their priorities and cadences straight blows my mind. If you're doing something more involved than handing out hot dogs, you probably have a bunch of tasks and recurring duties that need attention. If that's the case, then how aren't you tracking it?

I think people get confused with the utility and value of tracking yourself and keeping things in lists.

Four Types of Lists

If you start at "daily," you only work from your day, not from your goals.

Persist: My goals are what make up the various "buckets" of lists on my Trello. For instance, I have projects that are longer-term and require a lot of active reminders to keep doing them. If this were for your home, it'd be things like mowing the lawn every month, and ...I dunno. Whatever people do there. I call this list "persist."

Now: I have a whole trello category for my boss, which covers things he throws over the wall to me that he wants me to run down. Those are things I should close out sooner than later (if not immediately-ish).

Next: I have a category for "future" projects - things that aren't important that I've come up with that point towards the potential growth and success of the business. These are lower priority, insofar as no one's asking me for these

Cadence: This is that list that has people I coach, but also certain "hygiene" of the business tasks. One of my ongoing roles is to keep recurring meetings with people within my organization. Some of it is just "check in" level stuff. Other parts are more guidance and coaching-minded. There are over 800 people in the company. If I didn't have a list of the people who I wanted to check in with, I wouldn't remember to set up those meetings. So I have a list set up with the names of people, and I can remind myself when I last checked in witch each of them.

Just my method. But maybe there's some benefit for you to peek at it and think about it for yourself.

Checklist Manifesto

You might've heard about the book, The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. It's an okay book, but it was written based on the success of this article, which is much more succinct. The premise is simple: doctors and medical professionals figured out that if they operated from a checklist, they'd save lives.

I think this is true for non life saving universes, as well.

I don't mean to-do lists. I mean checklists for tasks you do repeatedly. Let's say you write reports at work to cover status or something (TPS reports?). Wouldn't it work better/easier if you just had a checklist to work from? Yes. Making videos? Checklist. Remembering to invoice? Checklist. Filling out expense reports (which I just failed), yes. Checklist.

Lists.

A Board of Priorities, NOT a To-Do List

I find that people who work from to-do lists work on smaller and less important tasks on any given day. They work on "now," but forget to check out their larger projects, their ongoing processes, and everything except the "what's bugging me in the moment." The distance between having a Trello board (or whatever - I don't care) where you track your big projects, your long term recurring items, your "what needs running down in the short term" and your cadence efforts (I guess I use this for shorter term but also for people) is VASTLY different than you starting with a blank to-do list every day.

For one thing, I don't look up at the ceiling and think about what I want to get done today. I open Trello, look through the projects I'm working on, and arrange my day (usually my week) around what I can tackle.

For another, if you make and then check off to-do lists, you have no object permanence. You're drawing from scratch every time. You're relying heavily on your memory and not a system.

You Do You (But)

The thing that feeds my priority boards are my work journals. I keep decent (but not world-class) notes in Obsidian (I don't care what you use for a note system). I can then remember to update my Trello boards appropriately as I move along.

But I do that in the opposite order most days:

• Check the Boards (Trello) - slot the tasks into scheduled time
• Use my notes to feed the progress of the info on the boards (Obsidian into Trello)
• Access recurring-use lists (Obsidian) so I don't have to remember certain process flows every time (Like I have one for writing these letters to you, for instance).

This is my process and it's served me well.

I make my lists, and check them endlessly.

Ho. Ho. Ho.

Chris...