The Swim Class Checklist

Alternatively, how checklists can make you more efficient at your job

There are things we do- both at work and at home- just often enough for them to be annoying. For example, my dog needs to take his heartworm medication every month and his flea medication once a quarter. Our butcher block countertops need to be oiled once a month. My kids take swim lessons 3 times a year.

These things are often enough that they can be nagging if you don’t do something about them. For example, I just have Todoist remind me that Bo needs to take his medicine on the first Monday of every month and Todoist does the heavy lifting of remembering when he has to take his medicine. He takes is flea medicine in the months that are divisible by three (March, June, September, and December). Todoist also does the task of reminding me about my butcher block countertops (the third Tuesday of every month). And, my kid's swim teacher does a really good job of emailing and reminding me to sign up as soon as she schedules the pool. Once I sign up, it’s on the calendar, and the calendar does the heavy lifting there.

While giving Bo, our 10-year-old American Bulldog rescue, his medicine is as simple as opening the cabinet and dropping it into his food bowl, getting my toddler and infant ready for swim class is not that straightforward. Classes are five days per week for 3 or 6 consecutive weeks and require a bunch of accessories.

The first time we went to swim class, my now-toddler was just over six months old and I had desperately overpacked (first-time moms, amiright?). The second time we went to class, I realized it was much easier if I took TWO towels with me- one for drying after swimming and one to use as a mat before and after class. By the end of our first week, I had compiled the beginnings of a checklist of exactly what needed to be packed for swim class.

The A&D Ointment was an add-on, which is why it’s written in different pen

Three months later, when RJ had to go back to swim class, I didn’t have to reinvent the packing wheel. Instead, I just found the swim class checklist and packed from that list. It was much easier the second time around (as things usually are).

One less thing to remember

Swim mornings in our household are a little bit stressful. Any parent will tell you that trying to squeeze something else in before 8 AM is no one’s definition of a good time. Trying to get out the door with a small human who doesn’t understand why they can’t eat (no food 3 hours before lessons) with all of the required accessories for both daycare and swim class can feel like a herculean task some days. Our swim class checklist gives me one less thing to remember in the midst of what is already a frenzied time. 

When every day at a high-growth startup can feel like a fire drill, we can also leverage checklists to help us build more efficient processes. For example, a 10-person company onboarding one new team member every month should not spend engineering resources on automating onboarding. It’s not a good use of anyone’s time! But, creating a list of all the software you’re adding New Team Member Anna to when you’re adding her in February will make it much easier in March when you’re onboarding New Team Member Shana.

You cannot talk about Automation without linking to this xkcd

To continue to use the onboarding example, as you’re onboarding someone to your company, it takes absolutely negligible amounts of effort to make a list of the tools you’re adding them to and store that list in whatever documentation system you use.

When I worked at GitLab, we ripped off the dbt Labs SQL Style guide specifically on this subject- New lines are free, Brain space is expensive. There are some things that can’t be checklists, but onboarding a new team member, reviewing a code change, or cutting a new product release are not things that fall into those categories. For any multi-step process, get things out of your head and you’ll find the process becomes immediately more efficient.

Continuous Improvement

I worked with a company a couple of months ago that was in roughly the position I described above. They had a dozen team members already, a bunch of tools and systems, plans to onboard 1-2 more people per month, and no sense about the best way to do it.

I worked with the CEO on what became the first version of their onboarding checklist.

1. There were the HR/Finance things that need to happen at any job- benefit selection, setting up direct deposit, and paperwork.

2. There were the understanding the business things that needed to happen- additional resources on the business domain, newsletters worth subscribing to, and videos to watch.

3. There were the onboarding to your role things- setting up coffee chats with all of your team members, setting up your local dev environment, and getting access to the tooling.

4. There were the understanding the company things- learning which Slack channel to you post memes in, knowing what meetings were optional vs mandatory, and building social relationships around interests.

We used this structure to help create the first onboarding checklist as a GitHub issue template. When the next hire started, we created a new issue from the template and customized a couple of sections to their role (Manager name, start date, etc). In Week 2, he realized that there were a number of tools he needed access to that weren’t listed. While we got him access, we also asked him to update the template. By updating the process every time we used it, we made it incrementally better every time. The next hire would have a better onboarding experience.

Self Documentation

Soon enough, we did have a comprehensive list of all the technology tools in place at the company. When a couple of months after the first onboarding checklist was alive, we needed to do some work around GDPR Compliance, we had a handy list of all the tools and technology at the company that made it much easier to get started.

If we had had to create a list in order to do the GDPR work, not only would it have taken longer but also it would have likely had mistakes- it’s unlikely we would have remembered all of the tools and technologies we had used over the course of building the business in the last couple of months.

Having this documentation was also useful when I rolled off my engagement with the company. When I was no longer the person helping them onboard new team members, they were still left with an artifact that they could leverage to onboard new team members.

I see this in my personal life too. I am not the only person who takes the boys to swim class, so being able to point to the checklist makes sure that they always get there with everything they need, independent of what adult is responsible for getting them there on any particular day.

But isn’t automation better?

Sometimes! When I was at GitLab, we had an onboarding script specific to the data team that cut the time that people spent setting up their computers down from work days to hours. We were hiring quickly enough where those days mattered, and the standardization was really helpful.

You want to automate a well-worn and well-known system. Automating from the beginning isn’t always the answer. If we had started with automation in the onboarding case above, we would have built something that didn’t solve the problem, but using a checklist helped us understand exactly what we were doing while trying to solve the problem. We used a checklist to help us build the process. Building the process helped us understand exactly what we’re going to solve with automation. 

The reality is that many problems cannot be solved with automation. My toddler, as much as I may wish, is not going to be packing his swim class bag on a daily basis. Checklists help us automate as much of the heavy lifting (the thinking) as we can within the limits of what automation is either possible or worthwhile.

My Checklist Manifesto

Every time I hired someone in my previous roles, I always sent them a copy of Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. What Gawande lays out is simple: People “require a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation—expectation to coordinate, for example, and also to measure progress toward common goals.” Checklists are a great tool for exactly this, both in our personal and professional lives.

Creating and using checklists, whether it’s to onboard a new employee or for any other project, helps companies better allocate their time and resources, keeps processes consistent between team members, and helps create systems and processes that are easy to replicate, customize, and build from. Learning to leverage checklists allows us to lean into the parts of our work that are not process-oriented and require new creativity to solve.