I confess, I like checklists ✅

Aug 09, 2024 2:38 pm

Happy Friday,

On Monday, I'll be taking honey from my bees. I currently have 4 hives, and while this wasn't a super productive year, I do have some honey to collect.

Now, this isn't a big deal, but two things make things a little more complicated: I don't have enough equipment, and some people would like to visit and help.

I have half the equipment I need, which means I need to accomplish the steps over multiple days, and because I have people coming, I need to do things in a specific order to limit the danger.

This is where my love for checklists comes in.

By the way, if you haven't read Checklist Manifesto, it's a good short read. Admittedly, the book goes on a bit too long about checklists, but it is great at helping you get over the idea that a checklist is a silly thing.

My checklist for getting honey would go roughly like this:

Day 1:

Install bee escapes on two hives

Day 3:

Remove honey supers from bee escapes, add them to the next two hives
Install bee escapes into the next two hives
Add supers and feed to the previous two

Day 5:

Blow bees out of honey supers and collect
Remove bee escapes
Add supers and feed the last two hives

I'm going to skip explaining all the jargon for beekeeping. If you'd like to know more, you can reply, and I'll happily tell you everything (Also, I've put all my videos fumbling with my bees on YouTube). The main thing about the list is that it works even with me having to adjust to my equipment and guest tweaks. The only thing that changed is which hives I start with and which hives I end with.

A simple list like this evaporates the mental load of remembering what to bring and what to do each day. It focuses on the most important parts, isn't too long, and is easy for me to keep handy.

Where I'm going from here should be pretty obvious. There are countless professional cases where small checklists can make complicated processes smooth and stable. Consider things like code reviews, QA, stakeholder reviews, product intake, production releases, etc. Some of these are obvious, and you likely have a functioning set of checklists; some of these, though, I bet you don't.

Look at code reviews. Countless teams and organizations conduct code reviews but with no guidance on what they are reviewing for. They're only as good as the person who does the review. A simple checklist for a minimum set of things needed to start and conduct code reviews might streamline the entire process while also improving the efficacy. I was listening to a retrospective, and this topic came up. One lead said they review for their coding standards, and another lead said, "Oh, I should probably do that too!" Imagine if they had a checklist!

And in case you missed this article.

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What I thought was odd about that post was looking at where AI would begin to replace various Scrum activities, so I thought I’d plug in a prompt to see what AI will cook up for something like a sprint planning.