Literacy Matters
We Can All Benefit From Using Checklists
Checklists Are An Essential Productivity Tool
As parents, we write shopping lists, we delegate lists of jobs to our children and prioritise jobs in the home.
Students develop success criteria with their school work and skill development so that they can gauge where they are with their learning, how to improve and the next steps for improvement.
As teachers we develop the details needed for each step in different processes and write priority lists and schedules for everything that needs to be done so that deadlines are not missed.
Pilots run through very strict procedures before take-off and landing.
These are all examples of checklists and, while incredibly simple, they can be invaluable as a motivator and a reminder of what needs to be done and the order in which things should be completed in order to reduce mistakes and errors in the process and get the best possible results.
The best known work on checklists is by Atul Gawunde in his book, The Checklist Manifesto. In a research study, surgeon Gawunde, introduced a simple checklist to a number of hospitals in an attempt to reduce the number of patient deaths during surgery. The use of checklists saw deaths fall by 47%.
TED talk Atul Gawunde CHECKLISTS
He wrote, "Checklists...remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instil a kind of discipline of higher performance."
Types of Checklists
There are two types of checklists
- Read-Do: you read each step of the task, and then perform them in order, checking them off as you go.
- Do-Confirm: you perform a number of steps of the task from memory until you reach a defined pause point, when you go through the checklist and confirm that each step has been completed.
Benefits of Checklists
- Checklists ensure that the essential tasks get done. Even if a step is very simple it can still be forgotten.
- They help avoid distractions by forcing us to focus on the task at hand
- Checklists free the mind from having to remember the steps that need to be completed and worrying about the possibility of forgetting to do something.
- Checklists can save time. Having the steps or lists written simply and in order makes them easy to follow and is likely to result in fewer errors, therefore avoiding time wasted needing to fix issues. They also help avoid the time-wasting “what-should-I-do-next” indecision.
- Checklists provide discipline and consistency and they can help when things go wrong or in times of feeling overloaded and stressed
- Checklists can improve productivity – there is something that humans find satisfying about ticking items off a list and research has shown that using checklists make us more likely to complete tasks.
Let’s put pen to paper and model the effectiveness of checklists and encourage our children to use them as another productivity tool. In times of remote learning and as students aim to further develop independence with their learning, CHECKLISTS just may be the answer.
