Recently Steve Pavlina wrote an article on “microtasks,” talking about breaking activities into doable bits. Steve indicated that his microtasks are different from David Allen’s more common “Next Action” terminology, but still looks like next actions to me.
Regardless, he goes on to give a really good example of how the concept can be applied within a checklist. In fact, I liked his checklist so well that I copied it into a text file and will modify it for my use.
His checklist also made me realize that I am not using enough checklists. I do use some, with the following snapshot being one I have used for my Friday Weekly Review and Planning sessions:
But, there are a lot of blogging activities I do (and sometimes need to re-do) that could really benefit from a checklist. My moving this blog to its new domain could have really benefited from a well-thought-out checklist, one that would have prevented me from making some of the same mistakes I have made before.
A good checklist keeps you from forgetting important steps and “valuable little tweaks,” and can be modified to include additional items as you learn from experience and mistakes.
Hence, I am in the process of constructing some checklists for my blogging activities.
What are your thoughts on checklists? Do you use any that “have saved your butt” a few times?