The Checklist Manifesto — Atul Gawande (Book Review)
There’s a famous method to beat procrastination called Pomodoro. There’s another method for the same where you spend 5 minutes on a task to get the gears shifting and help you get the work done.
I’ve known about Pomodoro for a long time, and I’ve known about the 5-minute method for a long time, but how many times have I practically used it to get something done? Surely less than five times in the last 7–8 years.
That’s the problem with these methods, hacks, and tricks. I mean, kudos to you or anyone who is a regular user of such methods.
Atul Gawande never disappoints. After Being Mortal, this is the second book of his that I’ve read. The book is good, no doubt, but it has the same fundamental problem I mentioned above. The author also paints a hit-and-miss, trial-and-error-esque story when it comes to checklists, which is a really good thing to admit.
The stories are great. My favorite one is: Van Halen had huge concerts back in the day and included a specific line in their contract with the organizers to have a bowl of M&Ms backstage, except for the brown ones. They took this so seriously that they’d go to the extent of canceling a show if the condition wasn’t met because it reflected that the organizer hadn’t read the contract properly. Imagine, one brown M&M and the show is called off!
The problem with some of the stories is that they all involved a feedback loop and some catastrophes before checklists became essential. Even after that, they weren’t foolproof or regarded as Bible-level importance in their work.
You’ll realize why there’s a disconnect: as you read the book, you’ll see it’s more of a personal biography of the timeline of a project. Atul was asked to create a checklist to be used in surgery rooms to make procedures more efficient on a global scale and establish an industry standard across hospitals.
Through this, he went on to investigate how checklists are used in other domains across different industries — most examples being from the world of aviation.
Unlike Being Mortal (an amazing book that everyone must read), which is exclusively about his own domain of hospitals, patients, and humans, this book explores aspects from other industries. Probably, the title could be different — something less generic and cliched than a standard non-fiction book title designed to boost sales. The current title reflects an impression of being the master book on checklists worldwide (considering its popularity), but it’s not.
Fundamentally, it says: if a checklist can help a pilot fly a plane with precision, it should help you too in your daily life. So yeah, try a checklist for some of the tasks you need to do repeatedly. It will free up some brain space, allowing you to focus better and do things error-free. It might be boring and tedious (the book acknowledges this in some stories), but give it a try.
