The Master Checklist

TL;DR

I set up a checklist system with daily tasks and goals aiming to make sure that I grow professionally and personally while having a balanced life.

The struggle

When reading career development blogposts and self development books, listening podcasts interviewees talk about their morning rituals or discussing “productivity” habits with friends, I often test the techniques and hacks they describe and sometimes get to see how they could improve my lifestyle.

However, I keep wondering how could it be possible for me (and even for them) to incorporate all these useful activities into everyday life, coordinate them so that they could all coexist and keep them going there for the time they require to actually produce the real claimed benefits.

So, for example, I would often question myself, how could I make sure everyday I:

• sleep enough
• journal
• workout
• stretch
• get enough deep work hours
• drink enough water
• take online courses
• blog
• make progress on side projects
• do medical checks
• stay close to family and friends
• read
• floss
• memorize stuff

I am in the quest to find a system that would help me track all these so that I can trust the process and relax.

The proposed solution

The solution I am currently trying out is, of course, a master checklist.

I first wrote down a list with everything productive that I was happily doing everyday and added everything else that I wanted to incorporate to my routine.

After that, came what I consider the most valuable part of the system: quantifying the dedication to each activity. I decided how much time I would spend doing each of the activities. I divided the day into 48 blocks of 25 minutes with 5 minute break in between. Then, I assigned a certain amount of blocks (or fractions of them) to each activity. [read about quantifying life]

There are items from the list, like fasting hours, that are not activities but behaviors. For those I assigned zero blocks, but should be quantified somehow in the future.

Later, I grouped the activities by type, just to make sure I took care of all the global aspects I care about everyday. I also classified activities as maintenance or cumulative, to easily get a sense of the impact of the activity.

Finally, I put them into a Google Sheet and converted it into a checklist.

The results so far

I’ve been using this system every weekday for one month now. I am getting to do about 90% of the blocks and enjoy the repeated state of satisfaction at the end of the day that this is bringing to me.

By going through the checklist a few times every workday and acting on it, I feel I am doing everything that is required to stay healthy, social and in continuous personal and professional growth, while still having around enough “free” hours a workday to do whatever else I want.

The master checklist is functional and reliable enough for it to be useful but there is of course a lot of room for improvement. I incorporated daily “meta-blocks”, allocated to review the daily progress that far and improve the system when needed.

Apart from regular tunings like adding/removing activities and adjusting durations, the main improvements I’m considering are:

• a scoring system for zero block items and activity prioritization
• better accounting for activities in the times-per-week and times-per-month frequencies

I hope in the future I can end up with a system that guarantees the growth and balance I mentioned before, keeps itself under continuous improvement and stays out of the way.

Anyway, I might also end up finding this too demanding/unnecessary/insane. In that case I will abandon, hopefully after expressing my reasons for doing so. Nevertheless, I don’t feel I will regret testing it for another month and using some undeniable benefits while doing so.

In the meantime, here I am, earning a tick on my daily blogging block.

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Write me at greggocabral@gmail.com to get invited to access the Master Checkist file