Heck, they're underused in general. Checklists to pack for vacation. Checklists for "what did I mean to do this weekend". Checklists for "here's what we need to run the volunteer dinner this organization I belong to does weekly". Checklists for "things to check before my presentation".

I'm nowhere near as obsessed with them as that may make me sound; by temperament I'm definitely a go-with-the-flow sort of guy... which is perhaps exactly why I make sure to use them in certain important places. Go-with-the-flow has its strengths but also its weaknesses. Selective augmentation with checklists means I can often end up with the best of both worlds between that and being "detail oriented" for important tasks.

I have been called "detail oriented" a few times in my professional career, and I sort of laugh to myself because it is absolutely and utterly untrue. I'm not detail oriented in the slightest. It's all offloaded to the computer, with my unit tests, checklists, and such. I just know I need that augmentation and am quite aggressive about getting it precisely because I know I need it.

checklists do wonders for my anxiety.

too often i'll have a sudden thought about "oh, i need to make sure to fix X" or "I cant forget to pack Y before the trip". My options to deal with those sudden thoughts are:

1. Do it immediately, which isn't always possible

2. Do it later, which means that I'll obsessively stress out about it because "what if I forget to do it? I need to make sure this stays at the forefront of my mind at all times."

3. Put it on a checklist and give myself permission to stop thinking about it until its time to do it

This is one of the key concepts of "Getting Things Done". Getting tasks and information out of your head so you can actually focus on what you want to accomplish or need to do. GTD has a lot more to it, but this is around 80-90% of it with the rest being implementation details. When you get the idea, as you have, you can start reflecting and trialing different systems to see what specifically works for you and in what contexts.

This is a very-HN way of describing it, but one way I conceptualize my list-making is memoization/function caching.

My brain already went through the hard work of figuring out what to do, so I should cache that result in the todo list. later I can do a quick O(1) lookup of what do and use all of my focus on doing that.

"The mind is for having ideas, not holding them." -- David Allen, author of Getting Things Done.

> Checklists to pack for vacation

I often have to travel for work. Sometimes I have a fair bit of notice in advance and sometimes I don't. In either case, checklists are super handy for me. I generally use either Apple Notes or Obsidian for these (previously Emacs org-mode but it's less convenient for the "add an item from your phone" case than the other options).

For the "notice in advance" case, I'll start a packing checklist pretty much the moment I know I have to travel and I'll immediately write down just a sentence or two about the purpose/objective of the trip and add any special things I might need (e.g. a Saleae logic analyzer for debugging or a GoPro for documenting). As things get discussed and the trip gets closer I'll keep adding things to the list.

For the "not much advanced notice" case, I'll look back at previous checklists to find one that has a similar objective and basically just copy it wholesale and tweak. Super super useful keeping those old checklists around, even if they're only 80% correct for the next trip.

I often use a checklist version for travel packing, where every item simply goes after each other with a checkbox, instead of usual checklist with every new item going on new line.

checklists for AI to track its state has been killer for getting the LLM to work through a process from end to end.

ive never considered using emojis as the checkboxes to compare between not done, in process, done, or failed though.

> Checklists to pack for vacation.

A thousand times yes. Here's an older version of mine: https://honeypot.net/2023/01/13/my-travel-project.html

While I'm on vacation, I make notes about things I've forgotten. Near the bottom of that list is a reminder to add those notes to the template so I'll do them the next time I travel.

My wife thinks I'm nuts. OTOH, I'm so much more relaxed before we depart because I know that I have everything I'll need for a fun, comfortable trip. And if I don't, it's going to be some relatively minor long-tail thing that's never come up before, not something basic like "pack underwear".

For your 'Dopp kit' - do you have duplicates for things that you use on a daily (or more frequent) basis? e.g. Toothbruth, hair gel

While I follow this approach generally pre-travel, I find that on occasion I can end up taking the 'regulars' out of my travel kit for use and absentmindedly place them back in their 'normal' locations when using them as part of my regular routine.

Not completely. I buy little travel toothpastes that inevitably aren’t the one I like using. I use a hot brush and soap for shaving with a safety razor at home, but pack a little travel shave cream and disposable razor for the road.

When it’s packing time, I treat that travel kit part as its own separate list and validate that each item is still in there, or temporarily borrow it from my normal setup. It’s also one of the first things I unpack when I get home so that I can brush my teeth that night.

Cheat code: it's not illegal to rinse out the little toothpaste tubes and fill it with your favorite brand! :-P

I have found that a tech organizer bag/pouch works great for dopp kit. It is stocked and ready to go basically all the time, with duplicates or near-discards (or specialty travel sized things).

I go even a step farther and some unique items I store in the travel kit. Not sexy, but my manual (rotating) nose-hair trimmer is small and lives in that travel kit b/c at least it has a home for when I need it, and doubles that I'd have it "just in case" when traveling.

Small tweezers, a flat nail file, small nail clippers, little comb, tide pen, folding travel toothbrush, extra tray of razor blades (in a zip-loc bag), sliver of bar shampoo (also in that ziploc bag), some hair-care products that I've transferred into tiny plastic screwtop containers from Daiso (search for "5 gram cosmetic containers"), a refillable travel perfume atomizer, etc. etc. etc.

Cork Puller (two thin strips of metal that slide down the edges of a cork) since that usually doesn't draw the ire of TSA, little round hair brush that folds up and has a sewing/button repair kit built into it. Also: some minimal medicines! Tylenol, Benadryl (runny nose), couple blister packs of DayQuil/NyQuil, anything that'll hold me over until I can walk/taxi to a convenience store.

All that stuff is in a little pouch that I keep next to my socks (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017SKRWL4 - bagsmart electronics travel organizer case). Grab 5 socks, 5 underwear, that pouch, into a packing cube and I'm 99% ready to go. Worst case: buy shirts and pants at your destination, but brush, shave, groom, bathe are all taken care of.

Wow. I independently came up with something almost identical for identical reasons, including the checklists for months out, weeks out, day before, etc.

I also have job interview checklists, beginning / ending job checklists, end of month checklists (for repetitive admin).

For all of these the checklist template is something I edit after one of these events after thinking "man, I wish I'd thought to do X" or "I wish Id thought of doing X earlier than I did".

It's also an amazing coping mechanism for ADHD.

That’s exactly how I ended up doing this. Otherwise I’d be all stressed that my excitement-addled brain was forgetting something, which it inevitably was. Now I have more concrete work to do before a trip, but it’s easier and far less stressful.

OMG. I showed my friends the wiki I made for a recent job hunt with details about every job, every person I talked to, a status page for “initial contact”/“recruiter screen”/“tech screw”/… etc companies, and a timeline of events. Some responded in horror. Others started taking notes. I’ve never been a PM, but I PMed the “get a job” to the extreme.

My wife uses tabs on a google sheet for packing lists. Different destinations and trips have different needs. But starting with history, and editing is much more reliable.

Then a post-review for things not used, things missed, etc.

A massive plus one to that. Being "detail oriented" to me is a of knowing "what needs to be done" and "how can I sort it out". Checklists excel at it.

Also kinda related, but I'm a huge fan of the "getting things done"[0] philosophy. Putting things down on a list, helps ease so much of the anxiety about not knowing, planning the next item, and most of all, relieving the cognitive burden of having to remember, which most humans aren't built for. There's a (personal and individual) limit to how many tokens our wet neural networks can hold, and I'd rather use them to focus on the task, rather than having to remember the task from memory.

Get that on repeat mode, and boom, you have checklists!

My wife and friends are at times annoyed by how anal I am about pulling out my phone to note things down whenever a new thought or task appears for me, but I wouldn't change anything about that. So much so, my task manager app is the only one app on my phone and computer that I have a subscription for (other than news and entertainment stuff).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

Checklists are the first step to automation, really.

Run the list manually, then automated each check point by point.

Voilà!

I've proposed using checklists at multiple jobs and people never want them. They always claim they're not necessary and add a ton of work. Then we all keep making the same mistakes every time.

I've quit proposing them for this exact reason. Sometimes I just make my own.

We use them at our business for travel deployments/installs. They must be printed, each line item must be signed off + dated + timestamped in the presence of another employee on the same travel team (who attests the signature and the work), and they can never be electronic in nature except for the creation + printing of them.

Typically we have a non-traveling employee or manager do the final once-over and attestation, though they don't review the work necessarily. (Usually they just spot check the gear being shipped/sent to the airport, Pelican cases, Airtag trackers, etc.) This has been helpful for organizational purposes.

We don't even computerize them in any way outside of taking a cell phone picture of the final checklist and uploading it to a shared Slack channel for archival purposes.

It has prevented so many problems. It also fails to prevent some... which get added to the next checklist.

None of those contexts are anti-fragile.

You probably don't want a lot of process reliability in anti-fragile contexts, like the startups you mentioned. You insist on reliability in fragile contexts.

> None of those contexts are anti-fragile.

Nassim Taleb (who coined the term), literally uses the aviation industry as a prime example of antifragility in his book[1], so I think our wires are getting crossed somewhere.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Ince...

Yeah, I love the book and remember that being brought up. I might have to go revisit that part of the book as a refresher. Aviation, in general and in my current mindset, doesn't seem to benefit from disorder the same way a lot of the other examples he uses in that book.

Aviation is absolutely robust though.

Do you happen to remember how Taleb framed aviation as anti-fragile instead of just robust/not-fragile? As an industry I suppose we're quite good at taking lessons-learned from failures and incorporating those lessons back into making aviation safer as a whole.

Antifragile means that whenever something bad happens to the system (i.e. an airplane crash), the system gets stronger by design. A robust system is just a system that is resistant to bad stuff happening (but does not necessarily improve once it happens, or at least it's not built that way).

I'd argue that most Western government institutions (say, governments that have been around for 200+ years) are what you'd call "robust"; likely churches (the Catholic Church, since it's quite centralized), as well.

Awesome, thanks for the reminder!

Aviation safety is designed to be anti-fragile.

Each flight and aviation as a market are very fragile, what is the entire reason its safety was designed to be anti-fragile. An anti-fragile safety process makes aviation robust, despite its inherent fragility.

What's the difference between a checklist and a todo list? Is it that a todo list is the things you need to do and a checklist is how todo one of those things?

They're similar, lists of tasks/items to check off. However, when most people talk about checklists they're often talking about it in particular contexts and a more deliberate construct than todo lists. Pilots, for instance, have pre-flight checklists. This is not an ad hoc todo list (the more common sense of "todo list") with arbitrary and possibly unrelated tasks (go to grocery store, pick up dry cleaning, outline paper).

Checklists, especially in system operations and safety contexts, also tend to have a bit of a procedural characteristic, possibly including conditional and even looping constructs or sub-procedures.

  - If HPA is energized
    - [ ] De-energize HPA
  - [ ] Enter radome

And order is important to many, but not all, checklists in a way that's not as clear in todo lists. You can probably pick up the dry cleaning before the groceries, or on a separate errand run, for instance. If you don't de-energize the HPA, you're possibly setting yourself up for some pain and suffering if you enter the radome while the system is energized.

A todo list is a unique thing, it’s about remembering to do all the things you said you’d do. There’s no implied consistency from one todo list to another.

A checklist is used repeatedly, and it’s about completing a task (or set of tasks) to a certain standard. If you’re following a checklist, you’re aiming for consistency.

I think there are two differences: urgency and immediacy. A checklist is urgent in a way a to-do list isn't. The sky will fall if a checklist is not followed when X happens, whereas a to-do list is kind of a nebulous list of nondescript tasks. A checklist's immediacy also implies a strict ordering, whereas a to-do list does not. For example, task A must be completed before task B or the sky will fall.

It's just a lot stricter operationally, which is why I think you'd get a lot of pushback trying to implement one for non-critical business tasks.

Checklists are usually for repeatable activities (or at least similar-enough ones).

The semantics of list types is an underrated problem that probably holds back the market of software tutorials.

A todo list is typically a set of unrelated things to be performed once and annotated as "done." Something may be performed periodically, like iOS reminders adds take out the garbage on a weekly basis, but each performance is really its own item. Sometimes a todo list will have parent-child tasks.

A checklist is a two lists: one a template and the other the record of performing the checklist. The template and performance instance records are a set of related things which may or may not be ordered or conditional. A special type of checklist is an inspection checklist which may include results from performing a particular checklist item as well as the fact that it was performed.

A checklist usually have dependencies; some items should be done in specific order

Well „checklists” on its own are just an idea for which selling won’t work.

Having dozen of checklists that work for specific scenarios would be worth it.

The travel checklist goes with me on the trip and serves to answer three more questions: (1) Am I bringing back everything I took, (2) what did I not use on the trip, and (3) what should I have brought (i.e. add it to the checklist after the trip has started)?

I take the list for a completed trip and use it to plan the next trip of a like nature. It has been very helpful.

I also have a second list for "things to do to the house before travelling" - did I shut the windows, turn off the lights, empty the trash, etc - yup, it's all on the list I followed before I left.

I do the same thing. A fun one I added a few years ago: Make sure to visually verify garage door is totally closed.

Two days into a trip our neighbor contacted us about our garage being open. We asked him to close it.

When we got back I found the automatic opener disconnected from the then-closed door. I asked the neighbor about it. He said the door would almost close using the automatic opener, but would stop and reverse. He disconnected the door from the opener and pulled it closed. (Certainly not the most secure thing, since anybody could walk up and push the door open, but arguably better than sitting open.)

I found the track was slightly bent on one side, as a result of banging into it with a heavy object while getting our camping gear out. It was causing the door to bind enough for the automatic opener to be triggered to reverse (presumably the "don't crush a human" safety feature).

When we left I pushed the button on the remote, saw the door start to go down, and left. By the time we were at the end of the street, with the door out of view, it had no doubt reversed and opened.

When I leave now I make sure I see the door fully close.

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande is well worth a read.

Gawande is a crazy smart surgeon and writer. The book is pleasantly short and makes its points really well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Checklist_Manifesto