This Productivity System Will Save Your Life
Hello friends,
Welcome to this week’s new members of the Mastering Your Mindset community who have joined us since Monday. Join the 1.9k+ others who are learning to master their mindset.
There’s a solution to some of life’s most complex problems so simple you might roll your eyes when I tell you.
It’s what engineers use to build skyscrapers, surgeons to save lives, and pilots to fly an 80-ton hunk of metal through the sky.
And it can supercharge your productivity too.
Ready?
It’s a checklist.
Stay with me—this isn’t some kindergarten chore chart.
Checklists are deceptively powerful tools, cutting through complexity like a hot knife through butter.
Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong used them to land on the moon.
When asked how they managed something so groundbreaking, Aldrin said they simplified the process into one task at a time: check, check, check.
Suddenly, the impossible wasn’t so impossible.
The checklist’s modern champion is Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto.
His revelation was that a simple checklist reduced surgical deaths globally.
And while our daily lives might not involve scalpels or rocket fuel, we can still benefit from this low-tech life hack.
Greg McKeown, in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, explains it best: “The mind is good for many things, but it’s a bad office.”
Translation: stop storing mental to-dos in your head; it’s a recipe for chaos.
Offload them to a checklist and free up brainpower for what really matters.
Inspired, I went checklist crazy. One for editing podcasts. One for writing newsletters (wink, wink). One for packing for trips (no more forgotten chargers).
I even tried one for listening better to my wife, but let’s just say… not all experiments are winners.
What surprised me most was the mental clarity and efficiency that checklists brought to areas I didn’t realize were bottlenecks.
For example, in podcasting—after 6 years and 10,000+ hours—I still make mistakes.
A pre-recording checklist has been a game-changer, though.
The key to a great checklist is identifying “pause points”—moments in your process where you can catch errors before they spiral.
For pilots, it’s throttle-up.
For surgeons, it’s before the first incision.
For podcasters, it’s “hit record.”
Simple, but effective.
So, start by observing your process. Write everything down, refine it, and test it.
Once it’s rock-solid, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
Tools like Google Docs or Apple Notes work great, but a physical checklist is satisfying to check off and harder to ignore.
Checklists may not solve all your problems, but they’ll help simplify your life, streamline your work, and keep chaos in check.
And if they’re good enough for brain surgeons and astronauts, they’re good enough for us.
Have a wonderful week, all.
That’s all for now - Scott (@motivatedscott).
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Up next on the podcast:
Why You Never Have Enough Time