subject: Time Management Tips - How To Motivate Yourself To Use Checklists Using 3 Unbeatable Arguments [print this page] Time management tips aboundTime management tips abound. And when you scan them, you look for what will give you time, double your effectiveness, and improve your quality of life. You also look for those you care enough about to actually use. Because the only ones that improve your life are the ones you actually use.
You know that you need powerful motivation to introduce a new practice into your busy life. What arguments convince you to actually adopt a new time management system? I suggest you consider following advantages that checklists will give you.
1. Airline pilots depend on using checklists.
Do you trust an airline pilot with your life and with the life of a family member? An airline pilot is only one member of an entire aviation team. This team routinely utilizes checklists. This ensures that they communicate effectively about each vital issue during flights. It is essential that every team member remain on the same page and use proven protocol to reduce risks. And for this, they use checklists.
You may feel that your life is simpler, and that the stakes are smaller. However, oversights can create devastating consequences for you, jeopardizing the level of trust others place in you. If you value your life enough to only fly with qualified pilots who rely on checklists, value your life enough to safeguard your effectiveness with checklists, too.
2. Statistics reveal that when hospital doctors and use checklists, your chance of surviving under their care increases.
Take the prestigious Johns Hopkins ICU, for example. When checklists were first required, infection from a common procedure dropped from 11% to zero. It is estimated that this prevented, over 2 years, 43 infections and 2 deaths. It also saved the facility something in the vicinity of $2 million.
This same experiment was repeated in 8 hospitals worldwide. The identical checklist was used. And the results were still more startling. Each and every one of the eight hospitals experienced 36% fewer major postsurgical complications in the six months after the checklist was introduced. Deaths fell by a staggering 47%!
3. Even doctors who hate checklists prefer checklists.
It is not essential to actually like checklists to benefit from them. The vast majority of those doctors who felt disdainful about having to use checklists admitted that they would prefer to be operated upon by a doctor who used a checklist!
Checklists are lifesavers because our lives have become so very complicated. Basic steps can too easily be overlooked by any of us at any time, leading to tragic consequences.
As an exercise, scan the daily paper... Notice how frequently simple oversights committed by educated and disciplined professionals precipitate crises.
Checklists Even Help You Think Better!
Another significant advantage comes from using checklists. When you reduce the clutter of information you try to keep in your head, you strengthen your capacity to make decisions that make you happier and more effective.
Recent tests prove conclusively that tasks as simple as remembering a string of numbers overburden the prefrontal cortex, interfering with effective decision-making. In one test, most of the members of a group who needed to retain only 3 numbers in their head voluntarily selected a healthy dessert from a selection. Yet most of those trying to remember 7 numbers reached for the double chocolate cake!
This indicates that when the part of the brain that makes rational decisions is preoccupied with rote memorization, the more impulsive part of the brain steps in. Making decisions impulsively is a setup. It leads to not only wasted time, but often regrets and lowered self-esteem, as well.
Consider how this impaired decision-making can multipy throughout your busy day, undermining your health and effectiveness. What a waste of personal potential!
Then conduct a quick tally. How many tasks, obligations and possibilities do you try to keep in your head? Wouldn't it be nice to free up that energy by using a checklist? How many mistakes have you made that using a checklist might have prevented?
The only way you will conclusively experience the dramatic improvement in your life that checklists can provide is by using them. So give them a try, so you can learn firsthand, over time! Like doctors and pilots, you will most likely be gratified by how checklists help you "get things right".
So, how can you use time management right now to live most effectively?
