The other day I was listening to a podcast episode involving an interview with Dr. Atul Gawande on the recent COVID-19 crisis. That reminded me of another podcast episode which I’d heard a few years ago featuring the same guy as a guest. But the topic was something that I can’t recall at the time of writing - but that’s irrelevant to this post - what’s relevant is that he mentioned a book written by him, The Checklist Manifesto, and spoke at length about the importance of checklists (specifically in the medical profession first, but also more generally in almost every aspect of life).

I must confess that I haven’t read the book yet (though I have read another similar-sounding book involving a spectre that was haunting Europe) but I can understand the importance of checklists for managing a lot of highly important tasks. In medicine, you wouldn’t want to forget replacing infected pieces of cloth with fresh ones, or in aviation you wouldn’t want to skip checking if there’s enough fuel for the journey; missing even the slightest of items could mean crossing over the line dividing life and death. Checklists can most certainly be among the most helpful administrative tools in such cases.

But I feel that checklists can play a great role in our daily lives too - for instance, even in something like creating this post! If only I had created a checklist of important points to look at before posting, I’d have noticed the typo in the title of the post. But oh well, there are some things we need to compromise on for demonstrative purposes. In many cases, it gets difficult to keep track of everything going on in our heads and around us - we are bombarded with so many interactions (both online and offline) that if we were to loosely hold on to the details in our head we’d be losing out on a point here or there occasionally. Perhaps it won’t be fatal but it’s certainly annoying - and to solve the problem all we need are simple checklists of things to do and tick off. Translating thoughts to concrete text helps a lot.

It may easily devolve into overchecklisting too, though - but as long as we don’t include stuff like “wake up and brush teeth” as members of our checklist party, it should be okay. The line to draw is very subjective and up to the individual, though. Check it out.