Checklists Improve Reliability

“In complex processes, certain steps do not always matter until one day they do.”

After years of shipping software, I noticed something uncomfortable. No matter how many pre-prod rehearsals we ran, or how seasoned the team was, production always found a new way to surprise us. Releases had quietly become a long chain of interdependent steps: business teams to notify, services to sequence correctly, and third-party integrations to coordinate. The work wasn’t harder than before, just far more interconnected, and a single missed step could throw everything off.

Gawande’s idea landed right there for me. I began keeping a release checklist:
✅ put up the maintenance banner
✅ send the user email about downtime
✅ bring systems down in order
✅ confirm the migration
✅ bring everything back up one by one
✅ remove the maintenance banner
✅ inform the users
(real checklist is much longer)

Nothing profound, but in a tense moment even simple things slip. A checklist doesn’t make you smarter; it protects you from the small mistakes that create the biggest headaches.

The surprising part was how much lighter my mind felt. A good checklist isn’t about control, it’s about clarity. It pulls the “what am I forgetting?” loop out of your head so you can focus on the work in front of you. That mental ease became useful everywhere.

Because of how effective they were at work, I made checklists for everything I do repeatedly: webinars, travel, blogging, investing. Not out of worry, but because running through them kept me steady.

I also saw the value in the two kinds of lists Gawande talks about. When I’m learning something new, I need a read-do checklist with every step spelled out. But most of my work benefits from do-confirm. I already know the tasks; I just need a quick pass to make sure a critical step hasn’t been skipped.

These lists didn’t remove complexity. But they made me more reliable in the middle of it, and that one change has saved me from more avoidable errors than any amount of experience ever did.

# About the Book

The Checklist Manifesto is Atul Gawande’s concise argument for why simple checklists can prevent failure in complex fields like medicine, construction, and aviation.

Buy the book: https://amzn.to/43H9O8T

This is part of 100 Ideas That Shaped Me from Books I Read