Quotes & Sayings About Checklists

Before taxiing out to the runway, we paused again for five more checks: whether anti-icing was necessary and completed, the autobrakes were set, the flight controls were checked, the ground equipment was cleared, and no warning lights were on. The three checklists — Atul Gawande

Living loved, we relax our expectations, our efforts, our strivings, our rules, our spine, our breath, our plans, our job descriptions and checklists; we step off the treadmill of the world and the treadmill of religious performance. We are not the authors of our redemption. — Sarah Bessey

Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance. — Atul Gawande

One of the most promising developments since the publication of "The Geek Syndrome" has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions. — Steve Silberman

When developing a Windows Store business app you should consult the following checklists to accelerate development while ensuring that a maintainable and testable app is produced. — Anonymous

I think people who make checklists are the most miserable and alone because they are looking for the perfect Entenmann's that is delicious and has no calories. Please, you want a brunette with a sense of humor, a doctorate and HIV-negative status? Good luck, honey. Love isn't so frequent that you can put conditions on it. — Paul Rudnick

My books are always tactical, bullet lists, this is what you need to do because I'm trying to appeal to people who are trying to change the world and they need checklists. — Guy Kawasaki

Rule, once again, is that every minute spent in planning and creating checklists will save you ten minutes in execution and getting the job done. This — Brian Tracy

The checklist is one of the most high powered productivity tool ever discovered. — Brian Tracy

Designers of electronic charting systems don't seem to understand that checklists themselves are not the innovation, because checklists are not substitutes for care. The real innovation is having staff use lists to consistently create the safest and highest-quality clinical environment possible. — Theresa Brown

I don't think we're ever going to be in a position where we can say this is the template, this is the checklist, that must be met [for intervention]. — Peter MacKay

Turning love into a commodity contributed greatly to the expansion of modern alienation ... It is the love of an actual person that transgresses the checklists and lets us accept another as they actually are. — Rod Dubey

Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. — Atul Gawande

Awareness, even at a subconscious level, beats fancy checklists without it, track or you will fail. — Tim Ferriss

And a surfeit of checklists, coupled with unscrupulous drug reps, is, Gary said, a dreadful combination. There — Jon Ronson

It's almost therapeutic driving there and driving back (to North Carolina), with the time you get to think about things as well as create checklists. — Kurt Busch

All involve risk, uncertainty, and complexity - and therefore steps that are worth committing to a checklist and testing in routine care. Good checklists could become as important as doctors and nurses as good stethoscopes (which, unlike checklist, have never been proved to make a difference in patient care). The hard question - still unanswered - is whether medical culture can seize the opportunity. — Atul Gawande

You get a checklist, and then you just sort of ride herd on it. It's just a few items on a single sheet of paper. — Kirk Kerkorian

I love plans. Checklists, spreadsheets, timelines. I am literally passionate about that stuff. — Claire Kingsley

No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes. — Steven Levitt

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And — Atul Gawande

checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us - flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness. And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities. But — Atul Gawande

In these modes, energy is at best regarded by architects as a set of necessary quantifications, bureaucratic mandates, and checklists rather than as a fundamental agent in novel formations of architecture. — William W. Braham

The shelves are filled with books about improving the process of leadership; discussions of how to hone its art are few. Checklists and processes do not challenge our ability to think, they do not force us to defend our ideas or look new ones in the face. They demand no depth. Defining leadership as an art rather than as a process does not mean that leadership cannot be taught. It merely means that gaining a greater understanding of leadership requires intellectual courage. Just as we develop physical courage by experiencing and functioning under physical fear and moral courage by making the choice of right amidst the pressure to do otherwise, so we develop intellectual courage through the discomfort and ambiguity of experiencing ideas that challenge our depth and perspective. Leaders develop intellectual courage by continuously sharpening the saber through education, and in doing so they
hone within themselves the art of leadership. — Christopher D. Kolenda

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 professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical. — Atul Gawande

Leibniz endeavored to provide an account of inference and judgment involving the mechanical play of symbols and very little else. The checklists that result are the first of humanity's intellectual artifacts. They express, they explain, and so they ratify a power of the mind. And, of course, they are artifacts in the process of becoming algorithms. — David Berlinski

A Checklist is an Externalized, predefined Standard Operating Procedure for completing a specific task. Creating a Checklist is enormously valuable for two reasons. First, Checklisting will help you define a System for a process that hasn't yet been formalized - once the Checklist has been created, it's easier to see how to improve or Automate the system. Second, using Checklists as a normal part of working can help ensure that you don't forget to handle important steps that are easily overlooked when things get busy. — Josh Kaufman

Checklists turn out ... to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction - in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains. — Atul Gawande

The routine requires balancing a number of virtues: freedom and discipline, craft and protocol, specialized ability and group collaboration. And for checklists to help achieve that balance, they have to take two almost opposing forms. They supple a set of checks to ensure the stupid but critical stuff is not overlooked, and they supply another set of checks to ensure people talk and coordinate and accept responsibility while nonetheless being left the power to manage the nuances and unpredictabilities the best they know how. — Atul Gawande

It's a very simple example to show that if you miss one step in a process in can cost you an enormous amount of time and money to fix. With a checklist, you can write it down and give it some someone else for them to do successfully. Checklists require discipline and organization, which is something internet marketers have to master. — Brian Tracy

Making checklists of things you're looking for in a person is the numero uno thing you can do to guarantee you'll be alone forever. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

But for a younger generation of conservative operatives who would soon rise to power ... They were true believers who meant what they said, whether it was 'No New Taxes' or 'We are a Christian Nation.' In fact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style, and exaggerated sense of having been aggrieved, this new conservative leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of the New Left's leaders during the sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policy visions, but between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmus tests, checklists of orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasingly lonely, any Republican who championed gun control effectively marooned. In this Manichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged. You were with us or you were against us. You had to choose sides. — Barack Obama

We don't like checklists. They can be painstaking. They're not much fun. But I don't think the issue here is mere laziness. There's something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us - those we aspire to be - handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating. — Atul Gawande

How often does it work out that people make their checklists of what they want in a partner and then go out and fall for precisely that person? — Tawna Fenske

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. The power of — Atul Gawande