I’m a big fan of productivity and being more organised, and am always on the look out for tips and tricks to turn it into practice. I’ve dabbled with the GTD system for a while though I’ve never fully implemented it. I picked up the Checklist Manifesto in a rail station on the strength of its cover and was interested right away.

I like the idea of building simple processes that handle complexity and applying them to parts of my workflow. I use lists all the time – mainly rough to-do-lists scribbled on scraps of paper, or dropped into Things – but I’ve never been a checklist fan. Reading the Checklist Manifesto has surely changed that.

Atul Gawande is a renowned surgeon, and the book roughly follows his work on an initiative from the World Health Organisation to reduce deaths and serious injuries in surgery around the globe. As a simple solution to the problem he researches, develops and tests a ‘safe surgery checklist’ that is rolled out with remarkable results.

The book is crammed full of in-depth insight into the environments and implementations of checklists which inspired Gawande during his research. These include the pre-flight routines of WWII bomber pilots, the schedules of major construction projects, and the analysis successful financial investors go through when weighing up a major deal.

For me, the real value of this book is how it explains the subtleties of how and when checklists work best:

“They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness. And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities.”

We are besieged by simple problems. In medicine these are the failures to don a mask when putting in a central line or to recall that one of the ten causes of a flat-line cardiac arrest is a potassium overdose. In legal practice, these are the failures to remember all the critical avenues of defense in a tax fraud case or simply the various court deadline. In police work these are the failures to conduct an eyewitness lineup properly, forgetting to tell the witness that the perpetrator of the crime may not be in the lineup, for instance, or having someone present who knows which one the suspect is. Checklists can provide protection against such elementary errors.

It’s easy to make a checklist (i.e. grab a bit of paper and jot down some steps of a procedure), but when reading the Checklist Manifesto I became fascinated with devising good checklists to make my job (or life, even) easier. After all, that’s what systems should do!

The Checklist Manifesto was a quick read, thought-provoking and instantly usable (I’ve already found various areas of my web design process where I’ll benefit from a carefully crafted checklist). Highly recommended from me—even if some of the operating theatre anecdotes are a little hard going if you’re a bit squeamish on the morning commute to work! I’d also say it’s a must-read for project managers and planners.