Book review: The Checklist Manifesto | Hacker News Reader

Book review: The Checklist Manifesto

lesswrong.com

164 pointslobbly86 comments

I liked this book, but it’s a prime example of an article or blog post that gets turned into a book by adding a bunch of things that don’t really provide more useful information, but seem to serve as filler to make it book-length.

I read the book, and I read the article that the book was based on. I don’t recall learning anything from the book that I hadn’t already learned from the article.

What article was the book based on?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

Agreed, I always wondered how those “Top 100 business books summarized!” books fit all that “content” into one book, then I read Checklist Manifesto…

It’s certainly not the only book I’ve read like that in the last few years. It’s maddening - I value conciseness in a book, not length.

I find myself wavering back and forth. Great fiction? Give me a big cinderblock of a book please. Full of world building and chapters dedicated to a single thread of thought going through a character's mind. Even to the point of sometimes when reading short fiction novels getting anxious towards the end, just knowing the ride is almost over.

Non-fiction/fact-based/instructional books I flip-flop hard between enjoying a brief enchiridion on leadership and management styles one moment while cradling a tome of a physics text book the next.

Such indecisiveness heh.

The problem is that you can easily read a concise article, nod your head, understand it, and then entirely forget it.

With a book, you get the main ideas presented multiple times, applied, examined, refined, put in context, etc. Now, you’ll also forget all that apparently extraneous stuff, but at least you’ll remember the main ideas.

Welcome to the genre of self-help books. I can't recall the last one I read that couldn't have just as easily been a long essay. "Here's a few good points and ideas, surrounded by a fuck-ton of anecdotes and proverbs, because you're not going to pay $20 for a magazine article."

> "Here's a few good points and ideas, surrounded by a fuck-ton of anecdotes and proverbs, because you're not going to pay $20 for a magazine article."

Though to be fair, sometimes those anecdotes are useful. I like examples, especially ones where an idea is applied to a situation that resembles my own. Also repetition is helpful to actually have a concept sink in.

Also, what's filler for you may be the most relevant section for someone else (e.g. an anecdote that matches their situation but not yours, or necessary repetition).

Also, I think software engineers, at least, have a bias to optimize for concision that can sometimes be counterproductive. For instance, I doubt a moderately long article that fully explains the core concept of cognitive behavior therapy would be as successful at actually changing the behavior of a depressed person than a more "redundant" book-length version. Maybe the short version would still work for some people, but that doesn't mean that's the best version for the majority of people.

I think we’ve lost the plot. The important thing is if you can recall and then use what’s in the book.

If it takes repetition or length to do it, so be it.

Some books even recommend you read them a second time for that purpose, like Getting Things Done and How To Win Friends and Influence People.

I think for the layman, those anecdotes that strike on pathos are what sticks. I remember the stories about patients who avoid mishaps through checklists that caught the wrong limb being marked and their (understandably) irate reaction more than statistics.

This is exactly what I remember from the book.

I actually think this book is one of the rarer examples where the various stories and anecdotes that are sometimes seen (rightly) as “padding”, are actually in this case quite effective at getting the message across in quite a memorable way.

It’s been a while since I read it but I seem to recall a lot of similarly effective stories about airline pilots too.

A book needs to be read 10-15 times in order to internalize it. Otherwise, when you're in the moment, you'll forget and revert to your usual pattern.

Is there research that 10-15 times is the threshold or is that based on your personal experience?

It's based on anecdotal evidence, particularly with sales training.

A charitable view I hold on days when my mood is good is, for each of us at any given point in life, there exists a magic sequence of words that will make a concept stick. That may be a story that hits one "right in the feels". That may be a sentence, the right sentence, that makes a complex concept finally click in one's head. So all those books, each talking about the same thing, each repeating an article's worth of content 200 different ways - they're maximizing the amount of readers that find the magical uttering, for whom it all falls into place.

On regular days with regular mood, I say it's just easy way of milking people, and that self-help genre died soon after being born, i.e. back in the days of Dale Carnegie.

IMHO both of these views are true. Some books make the "milking" part more obvious than others.

Have you read the book “Give and Take”?

I'm so so immensely relieved to learn I'm not the only one feeling this things.

Happened with all the self-help or self-improvement books I've touched.

The most excessive example of this being "getting things done" which was very trendy about ten years ago: the first third of the book were literally about the author bragging about results (but without any way to fact-check).

Last year I heard someone call out the value in your mind being exposed to a topic for a length of time. I've found this to be true. I recently reread The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and forming my own mental model and brushing it against what three book had to say gave me more value than just absorbing the book's content.

Why is that a negative? If a book has interesting, engaging content why is it bad that it has 200 pages instead of 20?

Books like this, IMO, are generally better when split into 2 pieces:

1. A "core" that describes the motivation for the ideas and then the ideas (as in, what makes a checklist, how comprehensive do they need to be, basic ideas on how to store and maintain them).

2. An expanded form, providing more detail on the motivation (issues that could have been mitigated if not eliminated with checklists, areas where checklists have succeeded, more specific practices around checklists that worked for some people, for the reader's consideration).

This lets you skip the fluff if you've already been persuaded by going with (1), or if you need to be persuaded or want ideas on how to persuade others going with (2). A lot of useful material ends up suffering from self-obfuscation by only providing or too strongly pushing (2) and not (1).

Since there is the New Yorker article, in this case both (1) and (2) exist (after a fashion, it's been a few years since I read that article so I'm not sure anymore what's in it but it is much briefer than the book).

Because with less padding, people could spend the other 180 pages reading about 9 other ideas.

Naturally, I know that's not so simple, but it is one of the key issues I have with books that say the same thing over and over again — lack of respect for the reader.

Because usually it doesn’t. It usually boring redundant content where you have to dig for the point.

The same is true for many articles: what I needed was a picture and a caption, what I got was 2000 words which didn’t add much at all.

Good writing of this kind makes its point right away and invites you to read more to expand on the point instead of holding the main idea hostage for most of the piece.

Another failure of the attention economy.

If he had only written the book, I likely wouldn't complain. But the fact that he accomplished the goal - convincing me that checklists were awesome - in a much shorter article, tells me that the rest of the book was unnecessary.

This is a plague on business books too, which are generally papers -- but who's going to buy a 10 page book from an airport bookshop? So they get padded on on autopilot.

One of the few actually good business books (Crossing the chasm) is a single drawing!

agreed. i read this book on recommendation several years ago and felt it could be distilled in a blog post and i probably would have gotten more out of it.

As somebody who also read the book, I recommend the book but totally agree. There are some interesting anecdotes in there but many are more interesting than persuasive. The book could have been half its length. I use checklists a lot and didn’t learn as much as I would have liked

It's been a few years since I read it, but my recollection is that it presented the same information as the article, but added a bunch of additional studies and supporting arguments. Which didn't add any value at all.

I disagree. The most interesting bits for me were the examples of application where things differed from my expectation. Construction checklists that included items of the form "Person A talks to person B" is the example that comes readily to mind.

The worst thing about the book is all the self-congratulatory back patting, but I think that's comparably present in the article. I still often recommend the book.

> it’s a prime example of an article or blog post that gets turned into a book by adding a bunch of things that don’t really provide more useful information, but seem to serve as filler to make it book-length.

I've seen solo technical authors trying to sell concise ~100 page books and you often see comments like "that's too expensive, you can read it in a few hours and ebooks don't cost anything to produce!", ignoring the value of the information and how it's much more effort to be concise over verbose. I can see why there's a pressure to stretch text out to make it monitisable.

Are there good examples of authors making money from very short books or articles? I'm amazed there still isn't a web microtransactions solution yet so e.g. blog readers can tip a small amount with no effort so concise + valuable information can be monitised and encouraged.

Depends on what you mean by "money". My book Mastering Modern Payments made ~$80k in its useful lifetime and it was about 100 pages.

That's awesome, can I ask what did you do for marketing before launch and after?

So I know Refactoring UI did ridiculously well (https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1289702466754211842) for example while being concise.

Marie Kondo and the magic of tidying up. It’s padded, but even with padding basically magazine article length.

Have you ever noticed that most books seem to be the same size? Book publishers manage this by:

1. adjusting the paper thickness

2. adjusting the font size

3. adjusting the line spacing

4. adjusting the margins

5. adding blank pages

The actual amount of text in a book varies dramatically.

Having read the book, I fully agree. Atul Gawande is obviously a smart guy, and the book is very readable, but I gained almost nothing from reading it that I couldn't have gained by just reading the LW article linked in the OP. Not recommended.

Gawande mentions the checklist libraries of different manufacturers. I've checked the references (and parts of the citation graph) but didn't find anything about them. The closest were NASA's standards about the typography and structure of flight deck checklist. Does anybody know about how are checklists managed in the real word? How are they stored, retrieved and most importantly updated, when something changes? Not theoretically. from first principles, but like, at the manufacturer?

Not manufacturers, but here's the USAF's collection of checklists (not complete, bases and smaller units will have their own libraries that may not make it into this):

https://www.e-publishing.af.mil/Product-Index/#/?view=search...

The guidelines for updating are in there, as well, I believe.

A better example is aviation, especially commercial. Planes come with Pilot Operating Handbooks (POHs) that contain checklists specific to the aircraft for preflight, inspection and failure scenarios (eg loss of engine power). Manufacturers periodically update these by issuing advisories and addendums to POHs. The FAA also publishes such advisories.

There’s a scene in the movie “Sully” that occurs right after the bird strikes that I’ve seen a few people in commercial aviation respond very positively to in its depiction of checklists during a crisis moment.

Nuclear industry here.

In the fanciest systems, checklists live in a computerized procedure system tied into the plant process computer, so the plant state and procedures can be kept in sync and mistakes can be avoided when the software can see if you didn’t actually do the step you were supposed to.

A more conventional approach is a document management system and controlled binders in the control room with the latest procedures, often laminated so they can be marked up and wiped off.

When working procedures on paper, we always use a circle-slash system for place-keeping: circle the step number when starting it, and slash through the circle when completed.

Finally, key procedures should have a separate document documenting the bases of the procedure—-why key values were chosen or what other documents they were taken from or depend on. That document becomes the key in change management—-if a dependency changes, or you want to change the procedure, you can use the bases document to ensure side-effects are considered.

Finally, procedures still have programmed regular reviews.

Yeah so I'm somewhat tickled that a nuclear industry technician commenting on a thread about checklists has two "finally..." points :)

Thanks too for the circle-slash system, I'm pinching that.

> Thanks too for the circle-slash system, I'm pinching that.

Yeah, that’s getting cribbed for sure!

There are firms that specialize in software to do exactly what you’re describing. But a lot of it is just cultural. For example, how do you make sure checklists are updated? You hire people whose sole job is to update checklists.

One example of a software firm in this space: https://www.fieldlogs.com/FieldLogsStatic/index.html

It’s been awhile since I’ve read it but I believe the book touched on the cultural piece. One of the unique things about aviation is that there culture if checklists starts with neophyte pilot and continues through their career.

Many other domains have checklists but not the cultural element. When it’s not engrained, you run into a lot of “I don’t need a checklists, I know what I’m doing.”

IMO the culture piece is the real tough problem to solve.

Wait, you don't build an X culture by creating an X department staffed with people whose sole job is to do X.

If you are serious about X, you do indeed need an X culture, but you get that by making it everyone's job to do X.

Creating an X department staffed with X people will have the exact opposite outcome.

Amazingly enough, most fields where death from mistakes is common, other than aviation and medicine, still do not use checklists. And, even most hospitals still don't, or do only in some places.

Police don't, anywhere I know of. Probably a few fire crews do (I bet mainly at airports).

Arguably, not using checklists, or even just not using one that one time, should automatically cause the defendant to lose any wrongful-death lawsuit.

A lot of EHRs implement checklists for procedures and checkups. Most doctors absolutely hate it.

Pilots did, too, at first. It took two generations before they loved them.

But pilot checklists are written by pilots. Who knows who writes EHRs' checklists?

> Making a good human-usable checklist takes a lot of workshopping. Airlines are still constantly revising their 200-page manual of individually optimized checklists for every possible emergency, as plane designs change and new safety data rolls in.

When I first read the book a couple years ago, and introduced checklists into my team, I found that there was no great tool to manage and create checklists and share it with my team. We were basically copy pasting messages over and over in Slack and "checking" them off manually by editing the message. Is there a tool or SaaS out there that solves this problem? (If not, great startup idea?)

Most project management systems have methods for dealing with checklists, this is definitely not what slack is designed to do no matter how much they market it as a "productivity tool"

So if you're not using something for project management first you need one of those, but just about everyone does, and once you have one you can start using it's checklist features

Then it depends on what that specific software offers, but even if it doesn't have a true feature for creating "templatized checklists" which I assume people want so they can repeat the same list, most have duplication functionality so you can just create one as a template and duplicate it as needed.

Is there a way to use checklists in Confluence in a way that's not terrible? My team has a checklist we go through regularly and have to use Confluence for this sort of thing. While you can make checklists in there, we can't find a way to make the check marks ephemeral. Every single time someone checks an item it updates and saves the page. We also can't find a "clear all" button. So every time we go through the checklist someone has to manually uncheck every single item, or forget and just leave some checked for the next time.

The best option I've found is to hack in a little bookmarklet to uncheck all of the items with a click. It works for now, but I've done this to fix other Atlassian annoyances in the past and they usually churn the html enough that the scripts regularly need to be updated.

> use checklists... in a way that's not terrible?

A disposable piece of paper and an ink pen? Confluence seemed to have a PDF export button so I assume it's possible.

Evernote has recently introduced checklists/tasks feature which is kind of nice though I have not tried sharing them.

obsidian is great for both notes and checklists. It allows you to have a simple checklist up front, but with clickable links that hide as much (multimedia) information, internal and external links as you need.

Google Docs has introduced checklists alongside unordered and ordered lists.

The keyboard shortcut to start a checklist is CTRL + SHIFT + 9.

Blew my mind when a friend told me about this.

Edit: Also, for software teams, GitHub supports checklists on their issues/PRs. My team has written a bot which blocks PRs until all checks are checked off. It's been pretty fantastic.

The markdown in github is damned annoying, though, it's whitespace-sensitive in THREE separate places (after the dash, between the brackets, after the brackets) - and then when you are saying "I did this" you have to add the x and delete the space between the brackets. I realize it sounds nitpicky but if you're really using checklists for everything then micro UX like this matters.

(I'm sort of hoping someone corrects me on this point & I find out a better way to use it because I do love the functionality, in theory, I just find myself never bothering to check off anything is completed.)

I think it's meant to be used from the web UI where you just click the box rather than replacing the space between the square brackets with an x.

I've also found this behavior annoying. There should be no difference between "-[]", "- []", and "- [ ]". There should be no difference between "- [x]" and "- [ x ]".

The solution we came up with is, for people who want to use the Web UI, GitHub has clickable checklists. For people who don't like the Web UI, we have commands.

To create a check:

    @bugout-dev check require <message>

To mark it as complete:

    @bugout-dev check accept <message>

Process Street, maybe? (https://www.process.st)

“Process Street is a simple, free and powerful way to manage your team's recurring checklists and procedures.” No affiliation, just interested in the same problem.

I came across this: https://columns.app/ some time ago. Neat attractive design, and a bunch of interesting features.

Looking through the feature set I don't see repeatable, templated checklists as a feature. Every app has normal checklists nowadays, but there are basically no solutions for repeatable ones (which is what the article/book are talking about).

I built https://operandio.com/

The best thing in this book is all the information on how pilots have checklists for everything. The plane that landed in the Hudson is used as an example and the checklist for total engine failure used in the book is one of my favorites.

In big bold letters at the top is "FLY THE AIRPLANE" along with each of the things the pilot should check.

Takeaway is the reminder in the moment that you are trained for this and the checklist itself is exactly what checklists are for -- don't miss a step. Nothing more, nothing less.

On a related note there is a bungee jumping spot in Taupo where the guys harnessing you sing like a small song which has lyrics of a checklist to make sure every lock is secured (They test each lock at the appropriate lyric)

It's kinda nice and funny and definitely gets the job done as lives depend on making sure all locks are secured.

Much of the elaboeate gesturing that is done by Japanese train drivers and platform staff is them mentally ticking off items. The movements makes it rote. So no need to recall the next step which is embedded in muscle memory.

It's more than a checklist - it's called "Pointing and Calling" and it's both to draw more attention for yourself and for communication with others involved.

I've been using https://buckaroosoftware.com/ChecklistWrangler.html for years now on my phone for my personal checklists. It's got way more features than I need (and hasn't been updated in years) honestly even checking things off the list is probably overkill and I could just use a text file, but its the only thing I found on the App Store that actually did a checklist instead of a task list. I've got drawings for a very simple checklist app but it's not become a side project yet.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/checklist-wrangler/id297229943

Need something like this for Android.

Somewhere in my unassorted notes, there's a sketch of a checklist app too, made right around the time I read "The Checklist Manifesto". My experience is the same: everyone does task lists. Nobody seems to be doing checklists - sequences[0] of tasks that repeat ad infinitum, evolve over time, and need to be surfaced based on situational context.

[0] - Actually not sequences, and not trees, but directed acyclic graphs. But this isn't the right time and place to go on a yet another rant about how none of the "hot" players in task management have figured this out.

Legitimate question, is there enough interesting information in this book worth reading if you already agree with the premise, that in complex situations checklists can be good?

I've known about it for awhile and this review does a good job at providing a real-world example of where it's useful, so other than ideas of how to make good checklists I'm not sure if actually reading it is something I should do

I skimmed it years ago, it could really just be a long essay.

Fun fact, it was a long essay which turned into a book – https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist (https://outline.com/8JS8h6)

I meant to say it could have stayed a long essay. But it was probably more effective as a book, since people hand them out and gift them.

If you have the means to "waste" money on the price of the book, I'd recommend it. But by "waste", I mean that the book could have been a thick pamphlet, but publishers sell books and not pamphlets, so by golly that essay is going to get the shit fluffed out of it until it is book-length. So you're paying for a lot of marshmallow cream.

That said, the premise is good and you might glean some good practices that you'll put to use. It's just that it's not worth the $15, IMO. If you have disposable income, buy it. Otherwise, just go read the New Yorker article referenced elsewhere in this thread.

It completely changed the way I work. I'm now a checklist making machine and I find it helps so much, not only with clearly defining what I'm aiming to do, but also with motivation, as each checkbox is a very small bitesize chunk that always seems manageable. I recommend giving it a shot. It's really short aswell so you could smash it out in an afternoon.

So I was following the service manual for changing oil in my wife's car. From memory it was something like this:

1. Place drip pan belo

2. Remove plug & drain

3. Use wrench to remove filter

4. Place new filter in

5. Replace plug

6. Unscrew oil fill port cap

7. Add 5 quarts of oil

8. Run engine for 5 minutes

9. Top up oil until level is correct as indicated on dip stick

Notice there is an important step missing between #7 and #8 (replacing the oil fill port cap). I think I changed the oil twice with no issue before I made that mistake and sprayed oil everywhere. I wrote up my own instructions that broke it down into smaller steps and didn't omit any after that.

Ever tried the "teach to smoke" challenge?

I'm not sure what that is, and google doesn't seem to be helping me...

I left out a word, maybe that's why searching didn't help.

https://wiki.c2.com/?TeachMeToSmoke

I remember reading an article some time ago about some people who inspected power lines from a helicopter. They introduced check lists and the number of accidents increased. It related to them no longer going through the plan as a team and absently mindedly checking off the list without thinking about it properly. My search skills are failing me and I can't find it anywhere.

this is completely unrelated to the content of the post, but, since when has lesswrong have such clean web design? 0.o

> In 2015-2016 the site underwent a steady decline of activity leading some to declare the site dead. In 2017, a team led by Oliver Habryka took over the administration and development of the site, relaunching it on an entirely new codebase later that year.

> The new project, dubbed LessWrong 2.0, was the first time LessWrong had a full-time dedicated development team behind it instead of only volunteer hours. Site activity recovered from the 2015-2016 decline and has remained at steady levels since the launch.

- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S69ogAGXcc9EQjpcZ/a-brief-hi...

great book and reminded me to take a stab at a great checklist UI...

hard to beat taskpaper

For the author: It's Johns Hopkins, not John Hopkins

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