Save Mental Bandwidth—Embrace Checklists

Project managers deal in a lot of processes. We lead teams through them, and many of us also create and/or implement them. And while some organizations strive to have a unified process for all projects, the Project Management Institute increasingly emphasizes that much of a project manager’s value comes in the freedom to tailor a process to fit a project…meaning to do our best work, we need to have many processes or process components available to us.

Many processes means there’s a lot to remember. What needs to happen, in what order? Not only do our teams need to do things in a certain order, but often we have to follow many steps ourselves to make sure we set things up in the expected manner to ensure work flows smoothly.

What’s my secret for remembering it all?

It’s that I don’t even try.

You know this blog is about checklists because of the title, and yes, I’m basically giving you the very simple advice, “write down your processes.”

I’m not writing about this because I think making checklists or writing out step-by-step directions is a new idea for you. But—perhaps precisely because the idea is so simple—I think most of us overlook lots of opportunities to apply it. We hold repeatable processes in our heads because we can, or because as busy project managers we don’t feel we have a few extra minutes to write the process down, or we’re moving so fast that it just doesn’t occur to us.

But as mentioned above, and as I’ve discussed before on this blog, some of our greatest value comes from the decisions we make about what’s best for the project. The more mental bandwidth we have to spare, the better decisions we can make—and not to mention, the less stressed and happier in our jobs we’re likely to be. So for both the quality of our work and the quality of our experience working, why not do everything we can to reduce our cognitive load?

With the high project load my team manages, I certainly need every bit of mental bandwidth I can get. I don’t try to remember anything that some form of written directions can remember for me. In the rest of this post, I’m going to share some of the specific ways I use checklists. I hope to spark new ideas about your own opportunities to leverage them…or at least motivate you to finally get that list out of your head.

To fill software’s gaps

At my company, we use a fairly robust project management software program, and I don’t know what we’d do without it. I’m currently working on a presentation where I’ll be talking about how I leverage this software’s templates, forms, and automations to reduce my own cognitive load, and these features genuinely help a lot in this area.

But they don’t do everything. For example, I can’t fully automate the process of opening a project in the software if I want the project to be set up in the way that works for my teams. I can’t auto-generate folders in a different software program (our cloud storage) and link them to the project. Nor can I make the labels on sub-folders within the project say exactly what I want them to say.

So in these cases, I put a task in the project template for myself called “Finish project setup.” Guess what’s inside of it? A checklist of all these little things I need to do manually. While it would be nice if I could automate these remaining items, working down a checklist is fairly mindless, and therefore painless. I do it faster and with much less effort than if I relied on myself to remember what all these tiny manual steps are.

To ensure you consider everything

One of the major forms of value my team provides is reminding people what needs to be considered starting a new project. What departments should be consulted? What processes or policies are relevant? Who needs to help with, or be consulted on, or approve the project deliverables?

I do largely keep all this in my head now, because it evolves quickly enough that a written list would require frequent updates—though if I’m honest, I’m likely missing opportunities for clarity and consistency by not doing so. But I did make a checklist at one time, and it was a great exercise to brainstorm what all might come up for a new project. When someone came to me with a new idea, I could look down the list and quickly identify what departments or factors warranted a discussion with respect to the project at hand, and what didn’t.

Similarly, I have a checklist of what questions I need answered before I talk to a print vendor about a new print project. Our video manager wrote a list of questions we ask a project owner between filming a video and editing it, to ensure the editor has the most up-to-date assets and requirements, which helps editing proceed smoothly.

In all these situations, there is no reason to spend the brain power trying to remember what might be relevant, when experience has taught you enough to make a list. Going through the list is fast, and the problems you prevent by not forgetting to consider something can be significant.

To remind you of your options

A list of options is not strictly a checklist, but it does help ensure you don’t overlook what might be the best option in a given scenario—likely reducing future work for yourself.

For example, we have a list of print vendors we work with regularly, with notes on their strengths and weaknesses. We’ve drafted a list of the basic project lifecycles we use along with their features and best-fit scenarios to help us as project managers have a shared language about why we might run a project this way or that way.

I could also see a list of options being useful in terms of tools, strategies, or approaches you might choose from to build your project processes—in fact, the DASM Browser from PMI® is a great pre-made list for you that can serve this very purpose.

To ensure you train properly

Training the people around you is itself a huge bandwidth saver, because it keeps you from having to hand-hold team members and stakeholders through their own roles in project processes.

When I train new staff members on our project processes and software, I have an outline—another form of a checklist—I use to make sure that I do so thoroughly and consistently. This could be relevant to any form of live training you do to level up the skills and practices of the staff around you.

To make your meetings effective

I write an agenda inside of every digital meeting invitation I send. While these agendas certainly help other attendees mentally prepare for my meetings, they are really mostly checklists for me to make sure I:

• Share all the right information
• Get all the right questions answered
• Get all the meeting’s goals met

When I write these directions for my future self, I barely need to spend any additional time before the meeting mentally preparing to make the discussion effective. I just open my notes and go.

These are just some of the many ways I rely on checklists. They play a huge role in freeing up my mental bandwidth, allowing me to be in the moment and make the best decisions I can about the task at hand. Alongside other strategies, they are an age-old, reliable tool that maximizes the value I can provide as a project manager while minimizing my cognitive load and stress. Don’t overlook opportunities to use them!