#MeetTheTeamMonday: Meet Kelli
National Checklist Day
Kelli McGuire, National School Partnerships Programmes Manager
National Checklist Day. Who knew? I feel like these days, there’s a ‘National (insert literally anything here) Day’ for just about everything. Most people probably don’t care or even realise National Checklist Day is a thing, but I love me a good list so let’s have a mini celebration here!
According to a quick Google search, the checklist was first developed after a fatal crash during some aircraft evaluations being completed by the US Army in the 1930s. The tech advances in these military aircraft had apparently resulted in too many pre-flight steps for a person to remember which led to ‘pilot error’ and the crash. Rather than give up on the super fancy new aircraft, a pre-flight list was introduced to avoid such errors in the future, and bam! The checklist was born.
While things in my life and my job are nowhere near that level of critical-to-remember-for-the-safety-of-others, I fully own the fact that I’m a bit OTT when it comes to organisation (at work at least, not so much home), and I get a weird satisfaction from crossing things off my to-do list. I’m not sure when or how this developed as I definitely wasn’t like this in school, but these days I feel completely scattered and unable to focus if I don’t have some sort of list (or 3) going during my work day (probably the reason my former manager so kindly suggested this topic for my blog post, haha).
Honestly, I don’t think I’m as intense as some people with their checklists (I don’t color coordinate or anything), but I do have to have my calendar out on my desk with my running task list in order to feel like I know what I’m doing. I’m constantly adding to it as things crop up throughout the week, and I get such a feeling of accomplishment when I get to cross things off (gotta take the small wins where I can get them). While I very rarely get to the bottom of my list and, more often than not, half the list just transfers to the next week, there is still a sense of actually completing projects and having a tangible result, which is so important for me when most of my work is done remotely and I don’t generally get to see the results.
So hey, next time you’re feeling frazzled and can’t focus, maybe try listing everything out and going from there. It can be a huge relief to simply see things in writing and put tasks in perspective to decide what’s important or will take the most/least time. Or, just write your list of things to do, scrunch it into a ball, and throw it across the room. You might not be getting things done, but it can make you feel better (without being overly destructive). It’s the little things, y’all ;-)
