Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009) emphasizes the power of checklists for improving reliability. Errors creep in when we forget things entirely or skip over things we should have done. In medicine, these errors can be fatal.

Gawande draws on his experience as a surgeon, the research he conducted with the World Health Organization, and insights from construction, finance, and other industries that take advantage of checklists to improve processes.

The book discusses ways to address the cultural resistance you might encounter when introducing a checklist. It recommends making sure that checklists are precise, efficient, short, easy to use, and practical. You need to develop a culture of teamwork where people feel that they can speak up as part of a team. You may even need to modify supporting systems to make the checklist doable.

I’ve sketched the key points of the book below to make it easier to remember and share. Click on the image for a larger version that you can print if you want.

I like the reminders that you should design your checklists around logical “pause points,” keep checklists focused on the essentials, and treat people as smart instead of making the checklist too rigid.

The book distinguishes between “Do-Confirm” checklists, which allow experienced people to work quickly and flexibly with a confirmation step that catches errors, and “Read-Do” checklists, which walk people step-by-step through what they need to do. I’m looking forward to applying the book’s tips towards systematizing my sharing. For example, I’m working on a YASnippets in Emacs that will not only display a “Read-Do” checklist for doing these sketched notes, but will also assemble the links and code to do the steps easily. Sure, no one will die if I miss a step, but I think discipline and thoroughness might yield dividends. I also want to develop a good “Do-Confirm” process for writing and committing code; that could probably save me from quite a few embarrassing mistakes.

I’m interested in the diffusion of ideas, so I was fascinated by the book’s coverage of the eight-hospital checklist experiment the WHO conducted. The book discussed the challenges of getting other people to adopt checklists, and adapting the checklists to local conditions. Here’s an excerpt:

… By the end, 80 percent reported that the checklist was easy to use, did not take a long time to complete, and had improved the safety of care. And 78 percent actually observed the checklist to have prevented an error in the operating room.

Nonetheless, some skepticism persisted. After all, 20 percent did not find it easy to use, thought it took too long, and felt it had not improved the safety of care.

Then we asked the staff one more qusetion. “If you were having an operation,” we asked, “would you want the checklist to be used?”

A full 93 percent said yes.

There’s a comparison to be made between the reluctance of doctors to accept checklists and the committed use of checklists by pilots and builders. I came across a quote from Lewis Schiff’s Business Brilliant in this comment by Rich Wellman:

The following quote sums up the essential difference between a checklist for a doctor and a checklist for a pilot.

“How can I put this delicately? Pilots are seated in the same planes as their passengers. Surgeons are not under the same knives as their patients. To paraphrase an old joke, surgeons may be interested in safety, but pilots are committed.”

So checklists are a good idea when you’re dealing with people’s lives, but what about the rest of us? Checklists are good for catching errors and building skills. They’re also great for reducing stress and distraction, because you know that the checklist is there to help you think. That’s why packing lists are useful when you travel.

Already a fan of checklists? Tell me what you have checklists for!

Somewhat related:

• My new Google Hangouts on Air checklist
• Forgot my keys; automating memory

David A. Fryxell’s Write Faster, Write Better (2004) is a journalist’s collection of tips that might help you write faster. Fryxell focuses on eliminating waste: wasted research, wasted interviews, wasted notes, wasted words, wasted drafts. You can do this by organizing, planning ahead, keeping your focus in mind, and writing a good-enough draft the first time around (instead of revising loose drafts that run too long or circling around a never-finished perfectionist draft).

I’ve sketched the key points of the book to make them easier to remember and share. Click on the image to get a high resolution version that you can print if you want.

One of the things that I struggle with is that I often don’t have a clear idea of what I want to write when I start writing it. I don’t have a focused high-concept phrase that explains my angle and the surprise twist. I don’t have a clear outline that tells me what kind of research I need to do, who I should talk to, and how everything fits together. I don’t have an editor who’ll force me to come up with a clear concept.

Maybe I’ll get there with experience. It might be okay to do this kind of exploratory writing – a little like journaling in public – and then apply Fryxell’s techniques to extract and polish a chunk that would be useful to other people.

It seems almost given that you should follow your passion, but what if you don’t know what that is? Or what if following your passion prematurely can lead to failure?

In So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (2012), Cal Newport gives more practical advice: Instead of jumping into a completely unknown field to follow a passion which might turn out to be imaginary, look for ways to translate or grow your existing capabilities. Develop a craftsman’s mindset so that you can improve through deliberate practice. Often it’s not a lack of courage that holds you back, but a lack of skill. As you build career capital, you can develop your appreciation of a field, possibly leading to a clear passion or a mission. You also can make little bets that help you move closer to the cutting edge so that you can make something remarkable. This qualifies you to do greater work that involves creativity, positive impact, and good control.

I’ve sketched the key points of the book below to make it easier to remember and share. Click on the image for a larger version that you can print if you want.

I agree with many of the ideas in the book, although I’m not entirely sure about the dichotomy that Newport sets up between passion and craftsmanship. Many of the passion-oriented books I’ve read encourage you to try out your ideas before making major changes to your life – for example, by working on your own business on weekends or by taking a second job. Very few people advocate leaping into the unknown, and if they do, they recommend having plenty of savings and a network of mentors, potential clients, and supporters. So the book comes down a little harshly on a caricature of the other side rather than the strongest form of the opposing side’s argument.

Amusingly enough, although the book describes What Color is Your Parachute as “the birth of the passion hypothesis”, I remember coming across the idea of gradually transitioning to a new field by first exploring something more related to your current one in What Color is Your Parachute, which recommends it as a way of lowering risk and clarifying what you want. I also remember the What Color is Your Parachute book to be less about impulsively following your whims and more about identifying and exploring the skills that gave you feelings of accomplishment.

Anyway, I think you start with curiosity. Then you develop a little skill. This makes you more curious, which helps you learn more, and so on. That–combined with feedback and appreciation–helps fan a spark of interest into a flame. So it’s not really that you start with passion or that you spend many years developing your craft before you can enjoy it, but rather that you gradually figure out both. (I have a feeling this somewhat agrees with what the book would’ve been if it weren’t trying so hard to distinguish itself from advice about passion.)

We just don’t normally express ourselves that way, I guess. It’s almost as if people are expected to either have strong convictions about their life’s work, or to be lost at sea. If you say, “I’m still figuring things out,” it’s like you’re a drifter. If you say, “I’m not passionate about my work right now,” it’s like you’re just going through the motions. I don’t agree with this, which is why I like the book’s emphasis on forming hypotheses about what you want to do, and testing that with little bets that also develop your skills. (This is particularly apropos, since J- will be choosing a university or college course soon.)

Anyway, after reading this book, the specific take-away I’m looking forward to following up on is that of exploring adjacent possibilities more systematically. How can I move closer to the edge of discovery in myself and in the fields I’m interested in, and what new areas have been opened up? I’ve been thinking about designing more focused projects that result in things I can measure and share. That’s similar to the middle layer of the pyramid that Newport suggests:

1. Tentative research mission – figuring out what you want
2. One-month exploratory projects with concrete results
3. Background results

On the whole, the book has a good message. You don’t have to love something to get good at it. Sometimes (often?) getting good at something will help you like it or even love it.

But the book feels a little… uneven, I guess? The anecdotes feel like they’re making too-similar points. The ones about failure feel unsympathetic and hand-picked for straw-man arguments. I imagine most businesses are not started out of the blue because of some grand passion. People prepare, they minimize risk, they work hard. Passion for something – either the work, the customers, or even just the life that’s afforded by the work – pulls them through the toughest parts and keeps them going. Sometimes they succeed for reasons unrelated to their skills; sometimes they fail for reasons unrelated to their passions. Sometimes things just happen. There are everyday businesses that don’t have the creativity, grand positive impact, or full control that are idealized in the book, but that still give people enjoyable lives. I think that the techniques and ingredients described by Newport in his book are good, but they are not essential to an awesome life.

On a somewhat related note, in the past few years, I’ve been learning to let go of the desire for either passion or mastery, Instead, I’m embracing uncertainty and beginner-ness, setting aside time for things I don’t quite love yet. It’s a challenging path, but it tickles my brain. =)

Anyway, if you’re looking for a counterpoint to the usual “Follow your passion!” advice and you want to check out So Good They Can’t Ignore You, you can check out this book.

Enjoy!

Don Maruska and Jay Perry’s Take Charge of Your Talent: Three Keys to Thriving in Your Career, Organization, and Life (2013) has plenty of tips for developing your skills and taking charge of your career. I’ve sketched the key points of the book below to make it easier to remember and share. Click on the image for a larger version that you can print if you want.

I liked the chapter on reflecting on your talents through a structured conversation with someone who can reflect back not only your words but also your feelings and hopes. Sometimes we don’t see the patterns in our thoughts until someone points it out to us. The questions are also good for personal reflection, and I’m looking forward to using them in my planning.

Sometimes people ask me to help them figure out what they want to do. Other books I’ve read about coaching tend to be pretty high-level, but this one gives concrete advice, including some notes anticipating potential responses or difficulties.

I also liked the chapters on creating tangible assets and sharing them with other people. That’s been a great learning- and career-booster for me, and I hope other people will try it out as well.

Among other things, the book also suggests listing at least one hundred resources (people, places, things, skills, …). Forced-length lists are great for creativity because you dig deeper than your surface answers, often coming across surprises. When you review your list, think about ways that you could make even better use of those resources. The book also suggests taking a look at your top 10 resources and working towards 100% use of them, which will be an interesting challenge. The third related exercise is to combine different resources so that you can break through obstacles or come up with interesting mash-ups – forced association, another great creativity technique. I like this reminder to apply creativity so that you can recognize and make the most of your resources, which allows you to MacGyver your way to growth.

Want the book? You can buy it from Amazon (affiliate link) or check out their website at .

Like this sketch? Check out sketchedbooks.com for more. Feel free to share – it’s under the Creative Commons Attribution License, like the rest of my blog.

Enjoy!

I’m curious about the internal citation of my blog. Which thoughts have been developed over a long chain of posts? Which posts do I often link to? Where are there big jumps in time? Where have I combined threads?

I’ll probably need to build my own data extractor so that it can:

• ignore weekly and monthly reviews, since I link to everything in those,
• reconcile short and long permalinks, redirection, and sneak previews,
• and maybe even index my sketches and look at follow-ups

and I’ll probably want to create something that I could eventually plot as an SVG or imagemap using Graphviz, or maybe analyze using Gephi.

It would be super-interesting to create some kind of output that I could fold into my blog outline or into individual posts. I would need a static dump for that one, I think.

How would I build something like this? One time, I used Ruby to analyze the text of my blog. That might work. I might be able to pull out all the link hrefs, do lookups…

As of Dec 3, 2014, there are 87 posts in 2014 that link to previous posts, out of 259 non-review posts (so roughly 34%). I used this SQL query to get that:

SELECT post_title FROM wp_posts WHERE post_content LIKE ‘%<a href=”https://sachachua.com/blog/20%’ AND post_date >= ‘2014-01-01’ AND post_title NOT LIKE ‘%review:%’ AND post_state=’publish’;

Hmm. I might even be able to do some preliminary explorations with Emacs and text processing instead of writing a script to analyze this, if I focus on 2014 and ignore the special cases (short permalinks, redirection, and sneak previews), just to see what the data looks like. Rough technical notes:

perl -i -p -e s/href/\nhref/gi 2014-manip.html
grep http://sachachua.com/blog/20 2013-manip.html > list-2013
perl -i -p -e "s/(<\/a>(<\/h2>)?).*/$1/gi" list-2013

(defun sacha/misc-clean-up-reviews ()
  (interactive)
  (while (re-search-forward "\\(Monthly\\|Weekly\\) review: .*</h2>" nil t)
    (let ((start (line-beginning-position)))
      (re-search-forward "</h2>")
      (delete-region start (line-beginning-position))
      (goto-char (line-beginning-position)))))

(defun sacha/org-tabulate-links ()
  (interactive)
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (let (main-link edges nodes)
    (while (not (eobp))
      (if (looking-at "^href=\"\\(.*?\\)\".*?</a></h2>")
          ;; Main entry
          (progn
            (setq nodes (cons (match-string 1) nodes))
            (setq main-link (match-string 1)))
        (if (looking-at "^href=\"\\(.*?\\)\"")
            (setq edges (cons (concat 
                               main-link  ;; from
                               "\t"
                               (match-string 1)   ;; to 
                               ) edges))))
      (forward-line 1))
    (kill-new (mapconcat 'identity edges "\n"))))

Ooooh. Pretty. Gephi visualization of the edge list formed by links, using the Yifan Hu layout. That big thread in the middle, that’s the one about taskmasters and choice and productivity, which is indeed the core theme running through this year of the experiment. The cluster on the right is a year in review. We see lots of little links too.

Internal links for entries posted in 2014

Now I’m curious about what happens when we add the posts and links from 2013 and 2012, too. I’ve colour-coded this by year, with It ties together posts on sketchnoting, blogging, choice, learning, writing, plans… Neat.

What does this say? It says that even though I write about lots of different things, there are connections between the different topics, and the biggest tangle in the middle has more than 320 nodes. I have lots of blog posts that build on an idea for three or four posts, sometimes spanning several years, even if I don’t think about it in advance. There are 90 such clumps, and it might be good to revisit some of these 2- and 3-post chains to see if I can link them up even further.

Also, it could be interesting to do this analysis with tags, not just year. Hmm… Also, I should dust off my data structures and algorithms, and make my own connected-component analyzer so that I can get a list of the clumps of topics. Good ideas to save for another day!

Do you talk about what you do and how you do it? Or do you start with why you do the things you do and why this matters? In Start With Why (2009), Simon Sinek writes about how great companies have a clear purpose and identity that inspires employees and earns customer loyalty. Here’s my sketch of the key points from the book so that they’re easier to review or share. Click on the image to view or download a high-resolution version that you can print.

What are my whys?

• Visual thinking
  • My selfish reason for visual thinking is because I want to be able to learn, think, and remember more effectively, so that I can live a better life.
  • My altruistic reason for sharing visual thinking is because there are lots of people who enjoy learning from drawings more than text or audio or video. I want to share how I’m learning, but more than that, I want to inspire people to take these techniques and use them for their own. From the resources I share, people can see that you don’t need to draw particularly well in order to use doodling as a way to explore the world or untangle your thoughts.
• Emacs
  • My selfish reason for Emacs is because I have fun tweaking my editing environment and doing so helps me work better. It tickles my brain. In addition, helping the Emacs community thrive contributes to the longevity of Emacs, which means it will keep growing, which means I probably won’t have to switch to some other tool in the future. (Planning-ahead Sacha plans ahead!)
  • My altruistic reason for Emacs is because I think something incredible happens when you take control of your tools, shaping them to fit your needs, expanding your imagination along the way. I want to help people become intermediate users and power users because I’m curious about what they’ll build for themselves and what they can share with other people. Also, the Emacs community has awesome people. =)
• Experimenting
  • My selfish reason for experimenting (lifestyle, semi-retirement, business, ideas, etc.) is so that I can figure out what works well for me.
  • My altruistic reason for sharing my experiments is to encourage other people to question their assumptions, look for ways to test their hypotheses, and gradually shape a life that fits them well. Come to think of it, it’s similar to why I like helping people personalize Emacs. If I can help people explore the possibilities in their life, we might come across interesting ideas along the way.

What are your whys? Why do you do what you do, and why does that matter?

So I was reading through J. B. Rainsberger's site because I liked his blog post on Productivity for the Depressed, which I mentioned in my post on learning slack. His about page had this nugget that made me stop and think. He wrote:

I have found over the years that many companies request training when they need coaching, and request coaching when they need training. Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Work makes the distinction very well:

• training focuses on increasing capacity
• coaching focuses on reducing interference
• performance is capacity minus interference.

Reducing interference. Huh.

I've been curious about coaching. I haven't quite made the jump because I'm a cheapskate who's accustomed to introspection and who's flexible about motivation. I figured I might as well see how far I can get exploring on my own, yeah?

But I know there are times I get in my own way, and I know that I probably don't know even half of the times that happens. Interference.

So here's what W. Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Work says:

I like this book. The author shares many examples of how paying attention to tiny details can help you learn more effectively, and how a coach's role isn't to provide answers but rather to help draw the student's awareness to the right things and encourage them to trust in their own learning process. The book is useful not only for individual change but also for group change.

The Self 1 / Self 2 distinction resonated with how I've been thinking about motivation. It reminds me a little of the driver (Self 1) / elephant (Self 2) metaphor used in Chip and Dan Heath's Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. The answer to internal conflict isn't “try harder,” it's to understand better and give yourself the time and attention you need.

I'm paying closer attention to the skills I want to develop. I'm practising more deliberately and with more focus. And when my Self 1 pipes up with “Shouldn't you be doing something else instead?” or “Let's go find someone with all the answers who can tell us what to do!”, I tell it, “It's okay. Self 2's got this. We're learning how to learn, and everything is going to be okay.”

This still leaves me uncertain about getting an actual coach instead of asking myself questions from books. Since I can see big areas for improvement even on my own, I figure I'd go for the low-hanging fruit and keep going until I hit diminishing returns. Maybe someday. In the meantime, this book has given me a few things to think about.

If you're curious, you can check out more reviews of this book on Amazon: The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure, and Mobility (affiliate link)