I am in favor of (check)lists for everything. I am actually surprised about how few developers take notes and make list. It’s one of the most important part of my workflow.
I've been convinced that checklists are great (by theory and by practice), yet I still write way fewer than I should.
I strongly dislike repetitive mental work, and writing a checklist is essentially resigning myself that such work will be necessary. Until I write it, I can still convince myself I'll be able to automate the process.
I use checklists to turn mental work ("uhh, let me think, what all do I need to do...") into straightforward physical work ("check, next step..."). I also use checklists as a first step towards automation and a stopgap until automation is complete, since I live in a constant state of infinite backlog.
If I run through the checklist a couple times and it seems to:
[ ] Cover everything
[ ] Not require complicated decision making or value judgments
[ ] Has few edge cases in need of handling
[ ] Doesn't require automation-opaque tooling
[ ] Not change more frequently than I execute the checklist
Then I know I have a prime candidate for automation, and already have great documentation of exactly what to automate.
Exactly. Checklists are great for non-critical tasks. Hospital triage uses the same checklist for pretty much every new patient. Triage is boring, but the fact that it is checklisted is what helps drive efficiency in the ER.
Similar boring processes in a tech business can be checklisted to increase efficiency, and the checklist itself can be iterated over. Everything from designing a new feature, to troubleshooting an error, to addressing a customer support ticket, to getting access to a new resource should use checklists.
Most don't have decent tooling set up for such a thing. Org-mode has a great feature where you can quickly capture todo items along with the place you were when you made them etc. (file/project, for example). I could be writing a function and get a thought about some upstream calling code, press a key, make a note, forget about it and carry on coding, knowing that it made it on to my todo list for investigation later.
If I had to switch to some other note taking platform it would probably break my flow enough that I wouldn't do it.
Checklists are useful, but they have their limits.
People too often get used to the routine and will end up skipping bits from checklists, or even outright missing stuff. It's strange, given whole idea of there being something to actually check would hopefully mitigate that.
Generally I do my utmost to avoid having checklists, so that they're left for things where they can't be avoided (e.g. where automation makes no sense, or potentially makes things worse)
> People too often get used to the routine and will end up skipping bits from checklists, or even outright missing stuff.
This depends on the person and their approach.
If I understand the need for each checklist step as a means of avoiding future hassle/work or outright danger of some sort, and I'm buying into the concept that I actually need to reference the checklist (perhaps even going so far as to print out a copy and actually physically check things off), and being properly conservative (no "I think I did that...", only "I know I did that" or "I double checked and yes I did that"), checklists stay very effective.
In other words, it's not enough to have a checklist, you need checklist discipline, the kind of discipline that can only be accomplished through buy-in to the concept. The same checklist approached with two different mindsets can range from a damn-near error free way to accomplish something, to a piece of scrap paper that would be worth more blank.
This does sometimes make checklist handoff problematic.
And your discipline might depend on the checklist. I'm way more disciplined about a release checklist than I am about a weekend chores checklist - and this is perfectly fine.
I strongly dislike repetitive mental work, and writing a checklist is essentially resigning myself that such work will be necessary. Until I write it, I can still convince myself I'll be able to automate the process.