Ask HN: How do you use checklists?

I use a number of types of checklists at work. They include:

1. Printed checklists that we provide to our integrators that summarize the details we describe in our design guide (we make industrial equipment that needs to be designed into our customers physical and computer systems). These are intended for our customers to confirm the covered all the important details in our design guide.

2. We have a similar type of checklists as #1 for our dealers' technicians to follow when commissioning one of our systems. In this case, the technician needs to sign it and also get the customer to sign it (marking it complete). Plus the technician needs to submit it to us to ensure warranty coverage.

3. We have production checklists when physically assembling and testing our hardware. These require a signature from a supervisor. The purpose is to help ensure that no steps were missed. We keep these in version control with our other documentation and they are updated as we change the process/assembly or find improvements.

4. We have less formal checklists that we manage in Trello. We use them for lightweight project manager. We also save templates of some Trello checklists for reoccurring processes (think sw release todos).

I know that sounds like a lot but we try to keep things as simple as possible. We've found that checklists are easy ways to reduce mistakes and communicate progress/requirements across customers, colleagues, and partners.

I constantly tell Siri to add a Reminder to the Reminders app for something I need to do. I specify a time that I need to be reminded and I'm automatically reminded. I used it over Thanksgiving to tell me when to put each dish into the oven or when to take them out. It was awesome! Anytime I think of anything, I just raise my watch and say "Hey Siri, Remind me at to do ". That way I never forget, there's no book to lose or checkboxes to uncheck at the start of each day.

Long-term stuff goes elsewhere (Trello with the team at work, for example), but my notebook is only day-by-day. So I actually wouldn't mind losing it.

In return, I get something that works closer to the speed of thought than any digital tool — I can write down a thought in less time than it takes to unlock my phone or open a Google Doc. That's important for me because it's too easy for me to not bother writing it down if it breaks my flow.

Wrote a blog post about one way that I use checklists: https://compiled.ctl.columbia.edu/articles/anders-daily-chec...

I use org-mode, of course. But more specifically, I wrote this little extension called org-journal [1], which auto-creates one org-file per day, is searchable, integrates with the Emacs calendar, and crucially, carries TODO items from the previous day to the current day.

This way, all my research notes, and my diary, and completed projects stays in the journal, but pending or ongoing tasks travel with me through time until they are done.

[1]: https://github.com/bastibe/org-journal