One of the more recent practices to become popular in the art of task management is the mind sweep. Instead of simply writing down our most obvious goals our top priorities, the aim of the mind sweep is write down a complete inventory of everything that has our attention. When we capture all of our thoughts, many of the ones that don’t occupy the foreground turn out to be the most profound once we examine them when they sit in front of us.
A checklist is essentially a targeted mind sweep. Where a mind sweep is designed to capture everything that has our attention in general, a checklist is designed to capture everything that has our attention on something in particular. Moreover, a checklist compels us to think beyond obvious aspects of a project and broaden the scope of our planning.
But unlike more intricate structures, like mind maps, checklists allow us to stay focused on broad aspects without trailing off into minutiae. If we need to drill down to another level of detail, we can turn the checklist into an outline at will.
Examples
Suppose you’re in a meeting and are suddenly informed that your company is acquiring a startup. You’d like to get an idea of the important implications of the acquisition before the meeting ends, so that you can have your concerns addressed while all the relevant parties on your end are in the same room. So you decide to draft a quick checklist:
- Acquisition price
- Effect on stock price
- Debt incurred
- Projected layoffs
- Assets of startup
- Circumstances leading to sale
- Public relations
- Exit strategy if spinoff is necessary
- Timetable for finalizing acquisition
- Profiles of startup management
- Immediate projects
The most important item on this list is “immediate projects.” You obviously want to cut to the chase and find out if the news is simply FYI, or if some input or deliverable is required from you. A minute or two of focused thinking allows you to address a priority sooner than later. Immediate projects might have come first on the list, but sometimes the most important considerations occur to us out of order.
The process remains the same for lightweight projects, like buying a birthday present:
- Recipient’s interests
- Budget
- Things as presents
- Events as presents (e.g. meals, concerts)
- Perishables (e.g. flowers, food)
- Sentimental value
- Dress size
- Time left to birthday
- What others might be getting
- Originality
This checklist might be better converted into an outline to consolidate things:
- Recipient’s interests
- Budget
- Things as presents
- Perishables
- Flowers
- Food
- Clothes
- Dress size
- Perishables
- Events as presents
- Meals
- Concerts
- Time left to birthday
- What others might be getting
- Originality
Though the latter version looks more complicated, grouping broad items allows us to generate details more consciously. For “clothes” we could elaborate specific clothing items: jeans, blouses, etc.; or we can add other considerations along with dress size: color, style, etc. Outlining in this fashion enables us to navigate to the desired level of generality or detail.
Sometimes a checklist can give you a thumbnail of a project plan if you extract a primary subset of items from the list. In the acquisition example, you might be asked to develop an internal report about the company being acquired. Having the checklist give you a head start on what to cover: assets, timeline, management profiles, circumstances leading to sale, and layoffs. Now you have focal points for researching your report, and it should be relatively simple to generate next actions to procure any information not covered in the meeting.
Exercises
Spend three minutes drafting a checklist for each of the following projects:
- Financing a documentary
- Ghostwriting a baseball player memoirs
- Renovating a house
- Learning to scuba dive
- Starting a side business
Comments
Vered - MomGrind
// May 15, 2008 at 4:29 pm
“Learning to scuba dive” – with your permission, I will change this to “learning to ski”, simply b/c I can more easily relate to that.
I LOVE it when you give examples, and exercises. Thank you.
Francis Wade
// May 16, 2008 at 1:52 am
I also benefit from using mindmaps, a technique I stumbled across when I was a teenager. i find that making a linear list is limiting when ideas don’t present themselves in some ordered fashion.
IMHO, this happens most of the time, especially when the field is is a new one. For example, I have no idea how to ski, and my wind would wander about before completing the sub-tasks. On the other hand, I know how to scuba-dive, so I’d be able to prepare a more linear plan before starting.
Andre Kibbe
// May 16, 2008 at 6:59 pm
@Vered: Don’t worry. I’ll be doing more examples and exercises a few upcoming posts.
@Francis: Lists definitely have a tendency toward the linear. One way to counteract this is with an outliner: e.g. MS Word’s Outline View, Omni Outliner, Bonsai, etc. Outliners give you the freedom to fluidly reorder list items and rearrange them into hierarchies if desired, which is harder to do on paper. In this sense, outliners are as revolutionary as word processors.
The difference between checklist and mindmapping is the difference between a thumbnail sketch and an illustration. With checklists we’re only concerned with the broad strokes. Spending two minutes drafting a checklist can unpack the critical minority of considerations. Mind maps are better for deeper exploration. A 10 minute window would be better spent drafting a mind map than a checklist, because you have sufficient immersion time.
Tim
// May 18, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Sooo massively disagree with you on the “intricacy” of mindmaps. If you treat them as quick and dirty brainstorming with a fast pen and a nice big sheet of paper it can be one of the best ways of rapidly getting a bunch of tangled, but related, stuff out of your head.
Indented lists I find useful when I already have the big picture whamped up: you can drill down into the details from each head.
Dan
// May 19, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Hi,
Great article.
There’s a web-based application that you can use to implement almost all of these ideas is:
Gtdagenda.com
You can use it to manage your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
A mobile version is available too.
As with the last update, now Gtdagenda has full Someday/Maybe functionality, you can easily move your tasks and projects between “Active”, “Someday/Maybe” and “Archive”. This will clear your mind, and will boost your productivity.
Hope you like it.
Andre Kibbe
// May 19, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Hi Tim,
I find that when I have a couple of minutes to draft a checklist, I’m able to put down the fewest moving parts of a project and get some sense of closure. When I spend a couple of minutes mindmapping, my mind keeps generating associations and wants to keep going until I’ve emptied my mental RAM on the topic, which usually takes about 10 minutes. The branching structure of mindmaps encourages that kind of free association, which is great when I want to think deeply rather than broadly.
I can write a checklist on anything: the back of an envelope, the pad in my notetaker wallet, a text editor, MS Word. With mindmaps I need a big sheet of paper, and since I rarely have one when I’m not at my desk, I do more checklisting these days than mindmapping; but if I want to survey a project more comprensively, I’ll take the extra time (and paper) to do a mindmap.