If there is one lesson to take away from the happenings of 2020 - the pandemic, the civil unrest, the killings - it is that each one of us is treading a path distinct from the path of everyone else’s, yet interconnected to the path trodden by everyone. Coming to terms with this lesson has ramifications. For one, it brings to the fore of the mind that actions (or inactions) we take matter.
But knowing our actions matter doesn't always translate into doing actions that matter. This loss in translation results from several factors. One of the most important factors is encountering complexities as we navigate life.
For the majority of us, the reaction to encountering situations qualified by many different interconnected parts is an unconscious pushback, a refusal to engage the situation. This reaction tends to deliver less than desirable consequences. It can keep us with a toxic romantic partner; it can keep us working an abhorrent job; it can keep us eating unhealthy food. In short, it can keep us in undesirable situations - far off from reaching our intention to live lives presented in our daydreams.
The fortunate thing is a simple yet powerful tool exists for dealing with complexities. So effective is the tool, it is used in the most complex of situations. Think flying an airplane; think performing open-heart surgery; think sending a man to the Moon. The tool simplifies the complex into manageable bits, taking away the resistance experienced from an encounter of the otherwise complex.
The tool is a checklist.
A more boring suggestion to dealing with a major feature of life could not be offered but - hang on - the promise of the checklist done right delivers exciting outcomes. To demonstrate the usefulness of creating and using checklists, allow the presentation of exhibit A: The effect of creating and using a checklist in dealing with a problem in my own life - scheduling my day.
Like most people planning my days isn’t something I am disposed to doing, a mental note for how a particular day is to progress often suffices. And if things get super tight, I use a todo list to bring some semblance of focus. I have an understanding (thanks to reading Calvin Newport’s blog and book) scheduling my day has tremendous benefits; the days I plan often fare better than days I enter without a plan. But given my record with the habit, understanding of the benefit of planning alone has been insufficient to get me to inculcating the habit of scheduling my day on a consistent basis.
That was until I made and began using a checklist for scheduling my day.
It turned out, without a framework showing exactly how I was to execute the activity of scheduling my day, it was impossible to sustain a commitment to the habit. The tendency, in efforts to commit to doing the activity, was to experience a kind of resistance born out of anxiety-inducing complexities and this often resulted in putting away doing the activity.
These days, armed with a checklist, questions, and anxieties that often impede the process of creating a plan for my day - How do I make a plan? Is this the best way to make a plan? Won’t events that will show up tomorrow even scatter the plan I make for it today? - are gone. I simply have to look at the instructions presented by my checklist to make one and in the event I meet resistance induced by a kind of complexity when creating my schedule, I refine the checklist at the specific step inducing the resistance to improve the effectiveness of the overall process. The result has been a 99% success rate. I have made a plan for my day everyday since I made a checklist detailing how to make one.
The best value offered by checklists comes from the activity of actually making a checklist. Gregor McKweon, who Matt D’Avella calls ”the champion of checklists”, gives the following instructions for making checklists. (A checklist for creating Checklists):
- Observe your process.
- Record your process.
- Try to do “it” using your recorded process.
- Refine your process.
- Teach your process to others.
Checklists dictate the way things are to be done right. Armed with one, when life throws at us the complex, our response, as we tread our unique paths, rather than be to remain bound in situations marred by complexity, can be to initiate and sustain active pursuit of meaningful activities to navigate our life-path and to touch, in remarkable ways, the life-paths invariably interconnected with ours.
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Be Remarkable!
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