Habits and Focus – Use Your Checklists!

Trying to find the best way to streamline your work so you can focus? Use your checklists! This is one of the best habits to allow us to get work done quickly and get it done well.

Did you know that today, October 30th is National Checklist Day? Apparently everyone loves checklists! I mean, why not? You can make checklists for anything! There are checklists for groceries, for setting up your office, for dealing with COVID or for applying for financial aid. And I LOVE checklists. For me, they are essential for creating habits and maintaining focus.

The reason we create checklists is to catch everything that may be related to what we’re working on and to ensure it all gets done, typically related to a particular outcome. This can be for ongoing situations or one time events. Getting it all out “on paper” is a great way to visually track what’s going on.

Over and over and over……

We create checklists typically for those tasks we do over and over again. One friend loves her pantry checklist. When she gets ready to make her shopping list, she uses her pantry list to see what she already has and what she needs to stock up on. She uses it every week and it helps her see everything he already has in her pantry without overlooking anything she might want.

I like to use my checklists when I’m trying to create habits. Habits are those tasks you can be do repetitiously without thinking about them. But it can take time to create that type of habit. Now if you’re only going for a single habit at a time that might be fine but if you’re trying to create routines or habit stack, the checklist just may be your best friend.

I read the Miracle Morning a few months back and knew that I REALLY wanted to stop the infinite snooze process. Hal Elrod has a short routine that you can use to get you there. While it’s short, it was still different that what I do every morning and because my brain doesn’t function at full throttle as soon as I wake up, I needed a checklist I could go over right away to know what my next steps were. And after a few days, I had my visual cues in place for my habits so I didn’t need to refer back to that checklist. But I can tell you that without it, I wouldn’t have succeeded in making this a solid habit. Now I can proudly say that I’ve ditched the snooze button for over a month!

I also tell you that story first because if I told you what was on my checklist, you would have thought, “I don’t need a checklist for THAT morning routine.” Which included putting in my contacts, drinking my glass of water, brushing my teeth, putting on my workout clothes, and making my bed. But as I said, I’m not at 100% when I wake up and if I’m not sure what my next step is, the snooze button becomes my friend. So I can tell you this works!

It’s Complicated…

What about those complicated pieces in life? Simple habit checklists are great but there’s much more to life than habits. Usually these situations have a lot of moving pieces, more than just 5… And these are the perfect time for a checklist! A checklist doesn’t have to be something you use for activities that happen over and over. Using them for one-time events is incredibly helpful as well. It lets me sit down to do the brain dump for the event and then deicide if there are any contingencies – timing, delegation, sequences that need to be followed. Once I’ve planned the work, then I can work the plan or in other words, my checklist.

Is your mother-in-law coming to visit in a week? Now is the time to put that checklist together! Think about all the things you want to get done before she gets here! Clean the house, meal prep for when she’s here, do you need to get a present for any occasion? Brain dump it all out. Then look at your contingencies. Based on work, you may have to plan your cleaning around that project that’s due. The kids can do the grocery shopping but they can’t do that until the meal plan is done. Once you’ve planned the work, now you can work your plan! And there might be a possibility you get it all done (and not miss anything!) before she gets here!

That’s just one example of using a checklist for a complicated or complex situation. But whether it’s for creating habits and repetitive tasks or whether it’s to be sure you’re managing everything for a one-time event, checklists are a great way create relaxed focus on getting done those things you need to get done!