Checklists

Definitions

Checklist can be defined as: ”A list of all the things that you need to do, information that you need to find out, or things that you need to take somewhere, which you make sure in order to ensure that you don´t forget anything.”

Checklists help us to manage complexity

You and I live in the era, in which complexity has overcome our ability to remember all the necessary things for doing something which requires expertise. You have a natural ability to deal with approximately ten pieces of information. Bigger amount of information exceeds the capacity of your working memory. Simplifying things can help us, but sometimes things are too complex and the consequences too severe. For example, pilots need to have checklists for take-off, flight, landing and taxiing. The cost of failing to memorize all the items from the checklists could be a fatal accident with hundreds of people dying. Routines are easily forgotten under the stress or boredom. They can also be skipped, even though you remember them, because their importance can be dismissed. Checklists protect you from failures like these. My problem with a checklists are that I forget to have them with me or I forget to use them while I have them. I rely too much on my memory.

Creating a checklist

You need to make decisions concerning on the checklist you are creating. You need to define a situation where it is used. You need to decide a time a place and conditions to use and create it. For example, a shopping list is created at home, going through a refrigerator and a freezer to find out what is missing, used as soon as you get inside of the store by striking through all the items until they are finished. You must also decide whether you want to have a do-confirm checklist, in which you perform the action first and then see the checklist and overwrite all the performed actions from the checklist. You may want to have a read-do checklist, in which you first read the item from the checklist and then perform the action. Then, after the action you overwrite the item from the checklist. Choosing the right way of using the list depends on the situation.

You also need to choose which items belong to the checklist and how it looks like. Simplicity and avoiding the most crucial mistakes are the most important things. Checklists shouldn´t be too long. You shouldn´t have more than ten items, especially, when the failure to go through them could be fatal. You should keep the list shorter by focusing the most lethal items. These are the steps that are easiest to overlook and the most dangerous to skip. The reason for this is that your attention starts easily to disrupt, when the checklist takes too long to go through. It is better to have many checklists in that case. A checklist should be no longer than one page. It shouldn´t have any waste or unnecessary colors and can have both uppercase and lowercase letters.

Using and creating a checklist is not a fast and desirable routine

Without testing the checklist in the real world, it will probably fail to fulfill its purpose. Finding an optimal checklist for the purpose you create requires trial and error. You need to study the failures the first versions of checklists provide. You have them optimize it gradually. Start with one change. When you see it work make another change until you are done. You will probably need to continuously improve it. When things change, you need to change the checklist. A checklist is only a tool for helping you. If it doesn´t help, refine it. If you cannot make it work, forget it.

It also takes time to use the checklist. You must create a habit to use the list first. This takes time from weeks to months depending on the task and how often you have done things differently in similar situations. Most people do not like checklists. They make you feel like you are like a child who needs continuous help. They are embarrassing to some extent. Nobody wants to show their checklists to others. You should see it differently. Checklists help you to get all the routines away from your mind. And you can start concentrating on the things that require deep thinking. You have to accept that your ability to remember all the things is restricted. Checklists help you. See them as a tool, instead of humiliation or a sign of weakness.

I have a simple list of psychological biases that have effects on me, when I am making bigger decisions. It looks like this:

• Egocentricity
• Association bias
• Availability bias
• Authority bias
• Social proof
• Scarcity bias

Sources:

Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande

Poor Charlie´s Almanack, Peter Kaufman, Charles T. Munger

Have a nice week!

-TT

Simplicity

Simplicity

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

• Steve Jobs

Definition

It is basically impossible to find one definition for simplicity. Most of the English dictionaries offer different definitions. You need to define it many ways. First, simplicity can mean something that has no complicated parts or complicated details. Second, the quality or condition of being easy to understand or do. Third, it can be defined: The quality or state of consisting as few parts as possible.

Everything should be as simple as possible, but no more simpler.

People are the most smartest living things in this planet and also the most complex ones. The world is so complicated that even the smartest experts have trouble in understanding their own discipline. Complexity has created enormous amounts of waste to everyday life. To reduce the waste you have to simplify your life. Simplifying should not go too far, because some of the complexity is necessary to be as effective as possible. Increasing complexity has a critical mass, in which the cost of added complexity exceeds the usefulness of extra complexity. Everybody needs to find this point in what they want to achieve.

Oversimplifying is not going to give us the results you want. You cannot be depended on one thing only, not in any part of your life. Keeping things too simple, believing there is only one solution or factor that has an effect on any bigger thing is a major cause for many failures. You can see lots of experts with excellent reputations believing in a single factor in big things like growing multibillion dollar businesses, for example, technological competitive advantage as an only source for growing Apple.

You should simplify with using simple rules and systems. You can add simple rules into your life, like do not eat after 10 pm. There can be rules for anything in life. It is pretty easy to invent the rules, but it is harder to apply them all the time. Therefore, you need systems like habits, skills, or some decision making systems, which make complex things simpler. Systems have normally less waste. You have to remember that systems are created from different parts. The amount of parts should always be minimal for the reason the system which is created and these parts should also be as simple as possible.

Multitasking: doing a shittier job, and being happier about it

People live in societies where the myth of doing many things at once is a sign of success. This is a wrong assumption and has no scientific base. Brains can do only one task at a time. What really happens is that when you are ”multitasking” you are rapidly changing from one task to another. Every time you do it, there is a cost. You get less efficient every time You change your task. What really happens in your brain is that multitasking creates a dopamine addiction feedback loop. This loop rewards your brain for losing focus and keeps it looking for external stimulation. Because of this loop, you get empty rewards from getting hundreds of small tasks done. The opportunity for multitasking is enough to harm your cognitive performance. What really happens is that you get more satisfaction for doing a shittier job.

You have also some metabolical costs from multitasking. Changing tasks makes your brain to burn up oxygenated glucose which is the same fuel for keeping your focus on tasks. Fast and continual changing from one task to another causes the brain burn the glucose so fast that you feel disoriented and exhausted after a short while. You have used all the nutrients in our brain. Your cognitive and physical performances suffer from this. You use a lot less energy, when you are focusing on one task at a time. All the changes in your tasks are also decisions. In multitasking, you don´t even recognize it. Decisions deplete your neural and physical resources too. Little decisions appear to use as much of your neural resources as the big decisions. You should arrange our environments in a way that your possibilities for distractions are as small as possible, especially, when you are doing the most important tasks of the day.

Information overload comes with too many parameters

There is always a maximum amount of information you can process within a period of time. Increasing the amount of information over this limit, you cannot function in the most efficient way. Human brains evolved in an environment, in which the amount of information was minimal compared to the World you live in.The capability of your brains is limited. The maximal amount of parameters, which can be either attributes of choice or the number of alternatives, is ten. After that limit, the quality of the decisions gets weaker. There is not so much difference after ten paramaters have been reached. It doesn´t really matter if there are over ten or even twenty different parameters or alternatives. There are many ways to reduce this number. For example, you can apply systems, in which the amount of alternatives have been reduced before, we even start making a decision.

All this is just a tip of an iceberg about the power of simplicity. It is hard to simplify your life and all the other related actions to an optimal level of simplicity. Everyone would do it, if it were simple, but it is easier to have too much simplicity or complexity. All the masters of their fields of expertise are able to get close to optimal level. Most people cannot do it and they live their lives with lots of waste, whether it means about using their time or efforts. Reaching an optimal level of simplicity should be goal to all of us. It is a skill you should try to learn.

Sources:

Poor Charlies Almanack, Peter D. Kaufmann, Charlie T. Munger
Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz
The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin
Insanely Simple, Ken Segall

-TT