The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is an exciting book about organizing complex repetitive tasks. Most of us use checklists as a simple reminder of what needs to be done, but author Atul Gawande argues that checklists can be much more than that. The complexity of specialized knowledge is ever-growing, and we need to find a proper way to deliver tasks as fast, safely, correctly, and uniformly as possible. A well-organized checklist can help us with that goal.
Although the author is focused on the medical field and gives some examples from aviation and construction, all bits of advice we can take into engineering and computer science, some of the tasks we do every day, like deployments, naturally fit into this mindset.
The book is thought-provoking, easy to read, and entertaining. It made me rethink some of my assumptions about repetitive complex tasks. But this comes from a guy who would find organizing a grocery shopping list in the Microsoft Planner fun.
Author
Atul Gawande is a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, a surgeon, and the author of several popular books.