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Comment by vincentmarle | Hacker News Reader

> 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?)

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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.

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 built https://operandio.com/

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

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).

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.

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