3 Powerful Ways a Checklist Boosts Your Productivity
One of the best ways to make sure you stay productive is to engineer your workspace and your workday for productivity. That means eliminating distractions and overwhelm so that you can focus on one thing at a time.
And another tool (that you don’t have to download or take classes to learn how to use) is a checklist. Since October 30 is National Checklist Day, now’s a good time to see if there are any tasks or processes in your business that could use a checklist.
Checklists help manage overwhelm
When you’re faced with a ton of things to do, you may have a hard time getting started on any one task. Or you may start inventing easy tasks to do just so you can check something off your to-do list. Neither of these will help you be more efficient at your work.
Once you start having a lot of tasks to juggle, as most entrepreneurs do, it’s harder to focus because you’re trying so hard not to forget things. Or you’re working on one task and suddenly you think about another one that you might or might not have forgotten. You may end up skipping steps because your mind is elsewhere, and then you have to take extra time to repair the damage.
Having a checklist that you refer to can help with this. As long as you have every step of the task or process written down as a step, you don’t have to worry about forgetting anything. Just check them off in the order that you do them.
It’s pretty common, once you have done something tons of times, to stop using the checklist because you figure you’ve got this. But there’s just too much going on in the modern world for you to always rely on “muscle memory”. After all, airline pilots have flown hundreds or thousands of flights, and they always go through their checklists before takeoff.
Checklists help you onboard staff faster
At some point, as a successful entrepreneur, your business will grow to the point that you need to hire. Some business owners might be content just to hire some admin team members, but some might want to build a bigger enterprise.
Having a checklist ensures that the work is done the way you want it, and it helps new staff members work more efficiently because they don’t constantly have to approach you to find out what they should do next. They just have to follow the checklist.
You may end up with workers who figure out an even better way to do the thing, and that’s great. They can update the checklist, so everyone can follow the new and improved method.
Checklists help you feel like you’re in control
As a business owner, you may already be in the habit of journaling at the end of the day and writing down the things you know you need to accomplish the next day, or adding them to a running task list so you can finish them later. After it’s down on paper, you feel confident that you won’t forget about it, and so you can let it go for the night.
Checklists are similar. You’ve got all the steps written down somewhere (preferably in a place where all your staff can also access it.) Now your mind can let go of trying to remember the process because you know it exists somewhere outside your head.
Best checklist practices
Keep them relatively short
If your checklist has 100 items, it's way too long. You may need to break the process up into several chunks and write a checklist for each one. Just as a massive to-do list is overwhelming and the opposite of productive, so is a massive checklist. Keep it manageable to be effective.
Store them somewhere everyone can find them
If someone needs the checklist and can’t easily get to it, you’ll be wasting time while they get access. Ideally, you have some kind of cloud document storage for your company that has regularly scheduled back-ups, and every employee has their own access to it.
Have someone else review it
It’s your business, so you probably have all the operations off by heart. You might have missed important steps in the process, or you refer to another document or task so the person using the checklist will need directions to it. Someone who’s not as familiar with the process can look it over and tell you what’s missing.
Recap
Checklists help you stay productive and feel less overwhelmed. If you don’t have any checklists for your business, take a look at your operations and see where a checklist might make sense to keep things flowing smoothly.