We’re HUGE fans of the project management tool “Trello” and within each task (created as “card”) is a super handy checklist function. So, you may think the answer to this headline is Trello but that’s a tool not a habit.

I’m talking about checklists, yay!

At TLD, we officially have a checklist for before we go live with any website, and we also have an official checklist of the elements we want our coders to include before they start building a website.
Our coder Tom explained that if we consistantly break down our change instructions into checklists, we would benefit even further from productivity and efficiency.
And we’ve been using checklists a lot when onboarding Charlotte into all the nuances of working here at TLD.
I asked Tom to break down his take on why checklists are such game changers.
Certainly – they help keep us on track, and if we break any task into smaller steps we’re more likely to feel those wonderful feelings of progress and less likely to forget anything!

Here’s Tom’s take on why checklists are so useful.

• Checklists provide quick readability, manageable form, and logical order.
• Great for repetitive tasks and making sure we don’t skip anything in the process while providing an opportunity to improve your workflow and tasks
• Easy to delegate, share, migrate or network to other people who are not familiar with a task. Can be read quickly or at a glance.
• Encourages you to be up a point, sharp, clean and clear.
• Boosts organizational skills and clear-thinking.
• Can be easily practiced and used in any form or environment ranging from a plain paper to a computer system (or even your own mind).

Types of checklists:

In order to help your mind wrap itself even further around this concept, I have, from the top of my head, broken these down into types:
Task related: these just help you remember all the steps you need to take for the task to be complete
Item related: Used for when you have to buy things (shopping lists) or collect things together (recipes/packing for a trip)
Safety/Piece of mind: I include the checks we do before we launch a website in this category, but this would of course be used by people in all sorts of IT, legal and medical professions
Repeatable: Anything you have to do over and over, definitely make a checklist! For example whenever we write a blog post, we include in the checklist the following:

• Compelling headline
• Formatting of body copy
• Links opening in a new window
• Featured image
• Categorisation
• Tagging
• SEO phrasing within the YOAST plugin
• Publish/Backdate
• Shorten URL with Bitly
• Share on socials media channels

Hopefully you’re encouraged to make this a habit of your own in your business and life. Be sure to conciously create a checklist next time you have ANY task to do.