Checklists: Saving Lives, Winning Wars. What Can’t They Do?
The New Yorker had a great article last year titled The Checklist. It describes how organizations ranging from hospitals to the air force have effectively used simple checklists to solve major problems. Hospitals use them to enforce the steps for safely putting a line in a patient and avoiding infections. The air force used a preflight checklist to get thousands of Boeing B-17’s off the ground during World War II.
At its essence, a checklist helps a user follow the best practices for either a complex or a mundane activity by making explicit “the minimum, expected steps.” Ativiti is attempting to build off of this same insight by helping experts distill the knowledge they’ve acquired into actionable steps.
The checklist above got us thinking - what is the ideal action to put in Ativiti? Do we expect our users to check off when they wash their hands? Probably not (though when they do, we know we’ve hit the big time!). Jack Cheng’s post on Time on your side has a great heuristic to use: any task that will take between 5 and 60 minutes is a great candidate for tracking in your personal task list or putting in an expert guide for others to follow. Anything shorter, and the cost of capturing it isn’t worth it; longer, and you probably haven’t done a good enough job of breaking it into actionable steps.
Comments
Leave a Reply