Day 20 of My Resume: My Checklist Manifesto

Do remember Chester "Sully" Sullenberger? He was the airline pilot who landed a US Airways flight in the Hudson River in 2009 when both of its engines had been disabled by flying geese.

Sullenberger was immediately acclaimed as a national hero. He appeared on daytime talk shows and glossy tabloid magazine spreads. He became a household name. Yet he always stressed that it was a full crew effort. And as Atul Gawande points out in his wonderfully thought-provoking 2011 book, The Checklist Manifesto, Sullenberger and his team also succeeded because they followed a humble checklist. (You can also read a great account of Gawande's ideas in this New Yorker article.)

Gawande makes a compelling case that checklists, like the kind airplane pilots use in emergencies, have the power to transform our world. As the world has become increasingly complex, and the amount of knowledge required for complex activities like surgery and airplane pilot has increased, it has become more and more difficult to ensure that critical actions be performed consistently and correctly.

A powerful tool to overcome this difficulty and to ensure success, he argues, is the simple checklist. Checklists have been proven to reduce errors in complex surgical operations and to save lives in airplane disasters.

Gawande doesn't delve much into how ordinary people can develop and use checklists for their own lives. His book is a manifesto about their worth, not a how-to book.

But it got me thinking about how a humble checklist can be a remarkably powerful tool in my own life, especially my work to overcome unhealthy eating habits.

I've been keeping a nightly checklist since I began this journey. It lists the things I try to do every day:
-- Meditate
-- Daily inspirational reading
-- Blog or Facebook post
-- Listen to an inspiring audio or podcast
-- Daily self-care activity
-- 7-8 hours sleep
-- Home-from-work ritual (cup of tea, scented candle, slippers)
-- 3 daily gratitudes
-- No sugar
-- No flour
-- Weigh all meals
-- Eat only at mealtime

Over the past two years, I've mostly treated this nightly checklist as a habit tracker. A way to monitor my actions and see how well I'm doing.

Missed meditating for three days? Better get back on track. Ate flour four out of seven days last week? Tighten that up. A checklist works well this way.

But I wonder if I can make it an even more powerful tool to get me through a difficult phase as I'm trying to resume? What if, at least temporarily, I made it one of my most important tools?

Since I'm trying to resume, what if instead of seeing it as a habit tracker, I instead think of it as something like a pilot's emergency checklist to save a plane that's spinning out of control.

I have set myself the task of using my nightly checklist as an emergency daily to-do list. I have decided to complete each step on my nightly checklist. Every day.

Because really, I know if I do that, my chances of success go way up. In fact, people who've traveled this path before me say my chances of success will be virtually guaranteed if I complete everything on my nightly checklist every day without fail.

I know that many leaders will warn against aiming for this kind of perfection. They will say you don't have to strive for perfection. And in general, I agree with them. When you're pursuing something that's not life-or-death, beating yourself for a lack of perfection can derail your efforts. You should aim for consistency, not perfection, when it comes to most things in life.

But what about when you're in an emergency or are stuck trying to get out of an especially critical sticky place? Maybe it can help to have clear, specific steps -- steps that are laid out simply on a checklist. Follow the steps, save yourself.

I'm going to try an experiment. For the next two weeks, I am going to treat my nightly checklist as a pilot might treat an emergency checklist.

For the next two weeks, I am Sully Sullenberger trying to bring my airplane back to a safe place.