Daily Checklist: How I Do My Daily Work Schedule Checklist With Process Street
One of the difficulties I faced over the past few years was transitioning to new roles and responsibilities at work.
You finally get really good at doing something and then a whole load of new stuff comes at you. Or sometimes, it isn’t even the new stuff that gets in the way — it’s a whole load of little things; tasks that aren’t hard but are numerous.
Right now, I don’t feel like I have that problem.
Sure, there’s always more you can do, and there are some projects I’d like to get done faster, but generally I’m pretty on top of stuff day-to-day.
The weird thing about this is that my role is more fluid than it has ever been. New things keep coming onto my plate every other week and I keep trying to systemize existing things to delegate out as functioning systems to others.
So why am I not getting lost in an endless sea of changing responsibilities and duties?
It’s pretty simple really.
About 2 and a half years ago I first started toying with the idea of utilizing a daily checklist to keep me on top of what I needed to do. But at the time it felt like it wasn’t necessary or wouldn’t fit with the irregularity of some of my recurring tasks and instead get in the way of some of the bigger open-ended tasks which typically took up most of my day.
This all changed about 18 months ago when I realized I was dealing with a lot more outward-facing duties — I needed to be on top of more communication channels, doing lots of little tasks, making more time for others, and still getting everything else done. I had been in this position for probably 6 months and I realized I needed to up my game if I was to do all aspects of this role, rather than just the stuff I was already good at.
This is when I made version 1.0 of my daily work schedule checklist.
From this point on, I found myself gradually being on top of more things, getting better results, and most amazingly having extra time to dedicate to other items, professionally and personally.
In this post, I’m going to walk through:
- Why you would use a daily checklist
- Quick tips to writing a good checklist
- The different software you can use to follow a daily checklist
- The current version of my daily work schedule checklist in Process Street
- How you can build and run my daily checklist (with a free template)
But first! — I recorded this video to talk through my checklist, why I use it, how it works, and how you can build one just like it! Check it out:
My daily work schedule checklist video explainer
Why you would use a daily checklist
Let’s not waste any time.
Here are the basic reasons why using a task list each day is useful:
- You don’t forget things: A checklist is a memory aid, that’s what they exist for. Every time you create a checklist you are expanding your available mental capacity by outsourcing space to a piece of paper or a software program.
- You do things in the right order: Sometimes it’s useful to do one thing first and the other second. When your surgeon follows a checklist, your life depends on them following that order. Your experience might be less drastic, but you could see results.
- You can measure a checklist: Once you write things down, you’ve standardized what you’re doing. You don’t have to be a scientist to know that you’ve made life easy for yourself in terms of measurements. You could time yourself to see how long it takes to complete all tasks, or you could time each task one by one. You could even do the opposite and see which tasks are not getting done each day and measure that over time.
- You can optimize checklists: Once you’ve standardized and measured something, you can seek to improve it from an increasingly informed position. You already had the qualitative knowledge of these tasks, now you have them quantified. Every time you improve the checklist, you improve your future self each time you follow it. The gains are cumulative.
- You can give yourself mental space: Not just the ability to remember things. Work is stressful. A checklist allows you to take tasks which weigh on you and take them out of your head. It helps you remove the stressful things by transporting them onto a checklist, ready to be worried about when the workday starts again; which is exactly the only time you should be worried about them, as that’s the only time you can do anything about them.
- They are proven to work: “Use of the WHO Surgery Checklist reduced the rate of deaths and surgical complications by more than one-third across all eight pilot hospitals”-WHO. That surgery checklist saved lives. Loads of lives. The only real problem in future replication of that study was down to whether the surgeons followed the checklist properly. If it was followed, results were similar. If it wasn’t, results dropped. The data speaks for itself.
Quick tips to writing a good checklist
I’m going to turn again to some quotes for this section.
But first, my top 5 tips for writing a good checklist.
My top 5 tips for writing a good checklist
- Make it easy to follow
- Start each command with a verb, when possible
- Provide detail when necessary but don’t be scared of blank space
- Make each point a single separate action
- Use software that supercharges your checklist
Two quotes on checklist writing from the best
“There are good checklists and bad, Boorman explained. Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on. Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything — a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps — the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.”
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, describing a conversation with Dan Boorman; former exec at Boeing, responsible for procedures across the organization.
“You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off — it’s more like a recipe. So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation.”
Checklist Manifesto again. A really valuable resource for anyone interested in checklists and using them well.
The different software you can use to follow a daily checklist
- Process Street: This much should be obvious as my checklist is built in Process Street. It combines simplicity with power. I’m just following a checklist exactly how I expect it to be, no crazy jargon or pipelines or channels or whatever. It’s a checklist. Simple. Yet under the hood there’s a whole load of stuff going on. I can make use of a ton of integrations — literally thousands of other apps and webapps. I can also use inbuilt features like conditional logic, variables, stop tasks, and reporting features with very little learning curve. It’s the best checklist app out there.
- Google Docs: If you’re looking for a full-on free, unlimited, flexible platform, then Google Docs is great. Many people already have Microsoft Word, so that functionally counts as a free option too — but Google Docs is just easier to access across devices, easy to share with others, and has a nice simple interface. Docs is limited for checklists, but if you don’t want to enter information and just want to follow it, then it can do the job. It’s a good basic option.
- Literally a piece of paper: Even though I use Process Street for my checklists, I still have my moleskin at my desk all the time. I find that writing things out as if I were bullet journaling ends up being really useful in those moments where I don’t know exactly what it is I want to write; as if the act of writing itself helps stimulate my thinking. I also like to use it for documenting tasks for the first time.
I would have included some other tools here, but Microsoft bought Wunderlist and ruined it. It used to be the best mobile app for creating super-basic checklists. It isn’t anymore and they’ve rebranded it to another proprietary Microsoft product. I’m honestly tired of Microsoft.
Anyway, Process Street has a mobile app now so it’s Microsoft’s loss.
I would give you some more tools but I’m not writing a round-up post, I’m just talking about what I do and what I like, so let’s just move on.
The current version of my daily work schedule checklist in Process Street
The current version of my daily work schedule checklist functions as follows.
I use my intro headers to note documentation. This is just something I like to do because it’s best practice. That way nothing can ever truly get lost.
Next, I have a couple of long text form fields where I enter my objectives for the day. The objectives are generally a mix of one-off tasks, things I wanted to remember, or large tasks which are upcoming.
Then comes the morning section. I know there’s a lot of stuff out there written on circadian rhythms and how it’s good to work in the morning because your mind is functioning at a high level, but I’ve tried that and it just does not work for me. If you’ve ever heard me attempt to play a musical instrument you would not be surprised to hear I have some issues with rhythm. My morning section is dedicated to little tasks, some of which don’t even need any action on a given day, but I just want to check to be sure.
Before you know it we’re back to the original objectives we entered in. Now that my little tasks are done I can focus on the big things. This will be the section where most of my day is spent other than…
Meetings! I have a section for meetings, but I think it could be improved. Right now I just remind myself to prepare for them, and then make myself confirm that I have moved forward with any action items. What I could do is build many duplicates of these tasks into the checklist template and then have a task called How many meetings do I have? where I choose a number from a dropdown field, and then using conditional logic (‘if this then that’ settings) the corresponding number of prep/action tasks appear below in the checklist. I don’t know. I’m workshopping this.
Finally, I have tasks to help me close up my day. These are small tasks with not much extra info as I get tired toward the end of the day and it’s best to just make life easy for tired Adam, lest he gets grumpy.
How you can build and run my daily checklist (with a free template)
If you like the sound of the checklist, you can find a public template version of my daily checklist here:
Daily Work Schedule Checklist for Editor Tasks
This is a sanitized version of my checklist where I have removed some tasks and details and many of the links kind of lie to you and take you to the homepage for the relevant applications — apologies in advance.
If you want to add that template to your Process Street account directly, just hit the Edit Template button.
All that said, if you want to build this or similar for yourself from scratch, this is what you should do:
- Sign up for a free Process Street account
- Click to create a new blank template (you can explore the premade library another time)
- Type your first task and put a colon [:] at the end of it (this is a shortcut to making a header rather than a task)
- Then put your real first task in (the shortcut is to just hit enter like you were starting a new line)
- On the right-hand side you’ll see a bunch of fields and widgets — grab the long text option and drag it into your task
- Label that field (it’s very obvious when you see it)
- Add some more tasks in the checklist each with a nice short name
- Test out the different fields and widgets you can add in your tasks
- In one of the tasks create a text field (this is the option highest on the list on the right-hand side)
- In the text field, you’ll see options like in any other word processor — look for an icon which looks like a magic wand and click it
- It will give you a search box and some options underneath — type the label from step 6 above into that search box
- Save your template
- Run your template as a checklist
- Fill in the long text field we created and labelled in steps 5 and 6
- Now scroll down to the task where you did the magic wand thing
- You see it?
Now you’ve created a template for a checklist where you can pass information through it to populate future steps.
You’re already an intermediate Process Street user. Congrats.
Let me know how you found creating your own daily checklist
Keep playing around and I promise you you’ll find a whole load of other things in there too.
If you have any questions about my checklist, how to use Process Street, or just want to say something nice, leave me a comment down below and I’ll make sure to reply to you!
Happy checklisting!
If you want to read some more content of mine, check out my Stories or some of my writing below:
— Agile ISO: A Holistic Business Process Management Framework
— Product Market Space: An Evolving Conception of Product-Market Fit
— The 14 Best Language Learning Apps for Fluency in 2020
— The 7 Best Language Learning Software of 2020: The Awards!
You can also find some other related Process Street templates here: