Templates and checklists: stop reinventing the wheel every day

Think about how many times a week you do the same thing: the welcome message to a new client, the steps to close the register, the list of things you check before handing off a job. You solve each of those with your head, again, as if it were the first time. And sometimes a detail slips through, because you are relying on memory on a busy day.

There is a way to stop paying that cost: capture what you already know how to do in a template or a checklist, once, so you never have to think it through from scratch again. It sounds simple, almost silly. But the evidence that it works comes from places where a mistake costs lives.

The lesson from the operating room

Surgeon Atul Gawande tells in his book The Checklist Manifesto how the World Health Organization designed a 19-item checklist to use before, during, and after surgery. They tested it in eight hospitals in cities as different as Tanzania, India, Jordan, Toronto, and Seattle.

Deaths fell from 1.5% to 0.8% and major complications from 11% to 7%, just by following a list.

Those results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009, mean nearly 47% fewer deaths and 36% fewer complications. And not because the surgeons were better: they were the same. The change was to stop trusting memory for the basic steps.

The problem is not not knowing, it is forgetting

Gawande draws a distinction worth gold for any business. There are errors of ignorance, when we fail because we did not know something. And there are errors of ineptitude, when we knew what to do but applied it wrong or skipped it. In day-to-day work, almost all our slips are the second kind: we already knew, a step just slipped our mind.

The checklist is not for the foolish or for beginners. It is exactly the opposite: it is for busy experts who know their craft but, in the rush, skip the obvious. A short list turns that knowledge into something that does not depend on how you woke up today.

A template and a checklist are not the same

It is worth telling them apart, because they solve different things.

• A template is a ready-written starting point: a welcome message, a quote, a contract, a follow-up email. You fill in the blanks and you are done, instead of drafting from zero.
• A checklist is a list of steps to verify so you forget nothing: closing the register, prepping a delivery, a final review before publishing.
• A procedure, or SOP, is the explanation of how a whole task is done, so anyone on the team can run it just like you.

How to create yours without going crazy

Do not try to document your entire business in one weekend; you will burn out and quit. Start with what repeats most, or with what a forgotten step has cost you the most.

• Identify the three or four tasks you repeat most each week.
• Next time you do one, write down each step as you go. That is your first rough version.
• Keep the list short. Gawande insists: the best checklists are brief and focus on the steps where things actually go wrong, not on every micro-detail.
• Store it where you will use it, within reach, not buried in a folder you never open.
• Improve it with use. If a step is unnecessary, drop it; if you keep forgetting another, add it.

The real gift: being able to delegate

As long as all your business knowledge lives only in your head, you are irreplaceable in the worst sense: you cannot get sick, you cannot take a vacation, you cannot grow without cloning yourself. The moment a process is written down is the moment someone else can do it. Templates and checklists are the first bricks of a business that runs without you watching every step.

They are also the foundation for automating. A message you already have as a template is a message an assistant can send for you; a booking process that is already written is a process you can delegate. First you organize, then you automate.

Where to start, depending on your business

If you struggle to decide what to document first, think about the moments where a mistake costs you dearly or where you lose the most time repeating yourself. For almost any service business, these are the obvious candidates:

• The welcome message and the appointment confirmation, which you send dozens of times a week.
• The day-before reminder, to cut no-shows without having to write it out each time.
• The list of what you check before handing off a job or closing the shop.
• The steps for handling a complaint, so your team responds calmly instead of improvising.
• The billing process and the receipt or invoice, so nobody charges too much or too little.

Turn one of these into a document each week. In a couple of months, without ever sitting down for a whole weekend to document, you will have the heart of your operation captured in templates and lists anyone can follow.

The takeaway

You do not have to be smarter or work more hours to stop making the same mistakes and repeating the same work. You just have to capture, once, what you already know how to do. Pick one task today that you repeat every week, write down its steps, and turn it into your first template or checklist. Once your messages and processes are organized, handing them to an assistant like Lidia on WhatsApp stops being a leap and becomes the natural next step.

Sources

• Atul Gawande — http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/
• World Health Organization — https://www.who.int/news/item/11-12-2010-checklist-helps-reduce-surgical-complications-deaths
• New England Journal of Medicine — https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa0810119
• Entrepreneur — https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/the-abcs-of-documenting-standard-operating-procedures/320266