Ask HN: Do checklists have a bad effect on the brain?

Checklists save lives, so they are very good for brains.

Atul Gawande's book The Checklist Manifesto is a good discussion on the development and introduction of surgical checklists. Read the reviews here: http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/

Checklists are both good and bad depending on how you look at it. They allow you to focus more on the task at hand as you are not focusing on the mulitple tasks required for you to do. Many productivity gurus speak about the reasons of success when it comes to checklists. Psychologically the main reason is that your brain delivers a boost of dopamine when you complete a task. Now as anything can, you can become addicted to this dopamine and hence when you complete a task without crossing something off of your checklist you won't feel as good as you would with one. Is it a serious addiction? Definitely not, but it is something to consider.

The stress of not knowing what to do under stress damages your brain more.

I am glad they use checklists at the doctor's office and in the airline cockpit.

I sure like having a checklist for a build procedure that I use every month because it frees me up to think about adding features and fixing bugs.

Does it matter? I dont trust my brain that much many times. Having a checklist is a good insurance policy when i havent had enough sleep, feel stressed or am mentally distracted. Those are times when I don’t want to use my brain that much.

No, checklists are great. They are great because while exercising your brain is good, sometimes you don't really care about exercising your brain, you just care about getting it right. For example, trying to restart an engine on a plane, doing a complex software upgrade, etc. There are plenty of times where you don't think of something you should have.

Checklists, remember, aren't detailed how-tos. They're reminders of things that you know how to do, which you need to do, and in the order (more or less) in which you need to do them.

A short, terse, sharp checklist is a supplement to your brain. You still have to think through the steps. The checklist is there to aid you, nothing more.

In my exp., I have to exercise my brain a lot to make a good checklist