- [Matt] There's a solution so simple to some of the world's
most complex problems that you probably won't
believe me when I tell you. It's what engineers use
to build skyscrapers, surgeons employ to save lives, and it's what allows pilots to safely fly an 80 ton piece of metal through the air. You might also be
surprised to discover that that same solution can be applied to improve your own productivity, creativity, and efficiency. Now, I need you to stay with me here. It's a checklist. (calm elevator music)
- When you have a situation where you're dealing with breathtaking and sometimes suffocating
levels of complexity, you need a system to handle it. And as it turns out, checklists are surprisingly simple. Almost absurdly simple solution. - [Matt] That's Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism and the person who first introduced me to the power of checklists. They're so powerful in fact, that they've managed to solve
seemingly impossible problems. Like putting a man on the moon. - [Greg] You know, when Buzz Aldrin is asked all about his
experiences up there. "And what were your thoughts on the moon and what were your..." He said, "Well, that
wasn't what we were doing. We had a long list of checklist items because we were doing something that'd never been done before. Something that was more complex than anything that anyone had done before. They had so many variables. We would simplify the whole process to do the next item on the list. The next item on the list. - [Neil Armstrong] And
it's on this timeline that we have all our procedures. So we obviously have to hold
these in place in zero-G. So we make use of the velcro and on the table. - [Greg] And by building that checklist so carefully and thoughtfully, they made something, to that point, impossible, possible. - [Neil Armstrong] That's
one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. - If there's one person
that deserves credit for bringing to light the
significance of checklists, it's author and surgeon, Atul Gawande. As Gawande details in his book, The Checklist Manifesto, he first started thinking about them when the world health
organization came to his team and asked them for help with a project aiming to reduce deaths in surgery. The solution, as you might have guessed, a checklist - We created a 19 item, two minute, checklist for surgical teams. We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world. Deliberately in places from rural Tanzania to the University of
Washington in Seattle. We found that after they adopted it, the complication rates fell 35%. It fell in every hospital it went into. The death rates fell 47%. This was bigger than a drug. (audience applauds) - Now, it's not that I
don't think very highly of the work that I do but this is not exactly brain surgery. So it makes sense for people
trying to fly airplanes, perform open heart surgery, or even land on the moon. But could it actually apply
to people like me and you? To find out, I gave my friend Greg McKeown a call. He's the checklist advocate that first introduced me to the idea, to see if he could explain how it might be able to
help me in my own life. - [Greg] The checklist relieves the mind of having to try to remember. The mind is good for so many things, but it's a bad office. It's a bad place to try and store things that you need
to remember constantly. So you remove that cognitive pressure and you also just carefully
select better over time, those things that really
matter most to you and you start making
small incremental progress on those items. - [Matt] I'll be honest. I don't find myself too
cognitively overloaded these days. (laughs) Joey. But I was ready to give it a shot. And as it turns out, when it comes to creating a checklist, well, Greg's got a checklist for that. - [Greg] One, observe your own process. Literally put a video up. Like a time lapse of the entire process. It's a two day process a week. That process, just video the whole thing. Record it somehow. Write out everything as you remember it. Once you've got a recording of it, a version of it, and written out in rough format, try to do it again using
that process yourself. Where you find that isn't correct, refine the process until you finally say, "Yeah, that is how I do it right now." And then it can be taught to other people. - So with the help of
The Checklist Manifesto as well as my checklist friend, Greg, I got started. And I made a checklist for
pretty much everything. I made one for my editing process. And one for how I choose
which videos to make. A checklist for when I interview people. One for when to say yes to commitments. And another for how I pack for travel. As I found out, there could really be a
checklist for anything. - [Greg] I'll give you one example. It's just listening. Listening deeply and
empathically with my wife. This is so important. But if I don't put it on
something I just forget to do it. There's so much else going on. But if I have it on there then every day when I go
through write my journal, I have a chance to reflect, "Oh, have I done that? If we spent time in that mode?" So you don't go very long
after that without doing it. The adjustment's quicker. - So then Becky told Stacy that she needed to go talk to Courtney because Laura, Laura L not Laura R, is about to go talk to Michael. And if she talks to Michael, but this whole thing blows up and I don't even wanna get involved. Are you even listening to me? - Oh my god, no way. Greg told me to do it. He's British. He sounds smart when he talks. Okay, as you can see, I went a little bit overboard. What can I say? I got excited. But even experimenting with
this for a short period of time, I've started to see the benefits of something as simple as a checklist. As Dr. Gawande says, "It's really about the
things that get forgotten, overlooked or missed." And that's definitely
something I'm realizing will help me with travel. I often wait till the very
last minute to pack for travel and I inevitably forget something. Whether it's charging
my Bluetooth headphones, adding shows and movies to my iPad, or even packing my toothbrush. So in order to create the most
effective travel checklist, I literally packed up all my stuff as if I were going on a trip. And while it might seem excessive to create a checklist for travel, I think it'll make each trip just a little bit less stressful. And I won't constantly be thinking about all the
things that I probably forgot. And as I started to put
together my checklist for filmmaking, I started to remember all the times that I've actually made mistakes. I've been making videos for over 10 years and I'm sure I've put
well over 10,000 hours into the process of filmmaking. And yet, even with all that experience I still sometimes film in slow motion when I didn't intend to. Shit. Overexpose my footage and so many more mistakes. And so a pre-shoot checklist
could help me with that. In my research, I learned an important part of checklists are what's called a pause point. The moments in a process where you can catch a problem before there's anything
you can do about it. For pilots, this is the moment that
they push on the throttle. For surgeons, it's before
the first incision. For filmmakers, it's right
before you hit record. As you go off and create
your own checklist, try to think of ways to include
these into your own process. When it comes to checklists, Greg likes to have a print out of it. That way he can actually go through and physically check
each item off the list and not skip it over accidentally, defeating the purpose of
the checklist altogether. - [Greg] You know,
checklists sound very, again, little vanilla. Oh, who wants a checklist? But they're using it
to increase execution, superb execution, fast execution. I mean a fighter pilot. You think a checklist? We don't need to- Yes.
In those scenarios, when the stakes are high, when you want to operate at
a high performance level, you want to make the process as smooth and effortless as possible so that you don't make massive mistakes just because you were
thinking of something else. - So checklists are
probably not gonna solve all your problems in life. But I have noticed that
they've already started to help my own creative process, identifying areas where
things are repetitive, slowing me down, or just getting in the way. Checklists have also helped
me to identify the things that I should be saying yes to before I even do them. And you know what? If checklists are good
enough for brain surgeons, they're good enough for me. If you guys wanna take a look
at a couple of the checklists that I made for this video. Like when to say yes. And when an idea is worth creating, go follow me on Instagram. I'll be sharing those along with a bunch of new original content exclusively for IGTV that expands on the topics
that I share here on YouTube. As Derek Siver says, "It's either a hell yes or a no. For me, I wanna make sure that each thing that I'm saying yes to, is a hell yes. I'll leave a link down in the description so it's easier to get to.
