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
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.
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.
ive never considered using emojis as the checkboxes to compare between not done, in process, done, or failed though.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then a post-review for things not used, things missed, etc.
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).
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.