From Tasks to New Checklists

In a post from before, I wrote about a new workflow that I had been following lately. I took inspiration from the PARA workflow, mental models, and checklists to create a personal workflow.

The post was brief, and I feel that the Checklists’ generation part needs a bit more elaboration. In this post, I wanted to expand upon one of the workflows. How can you create a new checklist or improve an existing list by reflecting upon what you did in your last project?

Let us understand this better with an example.

Example #

I work as a software engineer. In my day job, I review a lot of code. I like to follow a checklist when reviewing any code. I made checklists for reviewing different source code files.

During one of the recent code reviews, I came across many errors. Finding and fixing all the errors by hand would have taken a lot of time. I came across a linting tool - ESLint. Running ESLint on the source code found several other errors as well. Some of these errors could also be fixed automatically using ESlint.

I decided to add “Running ESLint on the source code” as a checklist item in my checklists database for code reviews.

The Checklist item is already linked to my “Code Review” Task template.

With time you will find that when you complete a job, you can create new checklists for doing the task or a similar task. You can also share the collection of lists with someone else in Notion!

Summary #

In this short blog post, I expanded on how new tasks and reflection upon how we did the job can let us build or refine checklists.

In later posts, I will expand how daily reading can also lead to creating new checklists.

Later!