In his book The Checklist Manifesto, known surgeon and author Atul Gawande defends the use of checklists to reduce failure and increase consistency in any kind of task.
The ideas in the book are extremely simple but equally useful. There are two main points in the book:
- Checklists hedge against failure;
- Checklists help increase the baseline of performance;
Gawande splits checklists into two types: DO-CONFIRM (where you stop to confirm each item after doing it) or READ-DO (where you use the checklist as a guide as you do things) and defends they must be kept between 5-9 items.
