The simple checklist has been around for eons of time. Even Santa is depicted as checking off his work. However in so many cases, our hectic lives have evolved away from this tool. We move too fast to pause for planning out the steps and recording them.

The dilemma is that as technology advances and steps become more complicated, we need these checklists more than ever. I am not talking about those ubiquitous ToDo lists that are scattered around, usually more than one per person, often with overlapping items because the lists keep getting misplaced. I’m writing about the step-by-step processes that you can refer back to each time you perform an activity until it becomes second nature to you.

As an example, an executive client of mine is now working for a new company that requires certain Excel spreadsheets to be created periodically. She was shown how to do this, and under direct supervision repeated the process. Because she has not needed to use the program herself in the past, after a lapse of time that process is forgotten and the creation of another sheet takes her four times as long to produce as it should because it is a “new” task. It would be so much easier to have a checklist that she could follow each time.

I suggest that when you are shown a new operation, you write the steps down even though it seems easy enough to remember at the moment. You might even keep a personal Procedures notebook. This is something I require my administrative assistant to have. Each time I show her something new I want her to take on, I have her bring along her notebook to record what I’m demonstrating. From a time management point of view, I then don’t have to repeat the steps with her several times while she is developing mastery.

Organizations are now recognizing that complexity is requiring us to use checklists move. Medical services keep adding new machines that need to be monitored and health-care procedures that must be followed. Peter Pronovost is a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and he has been advocating for hospitals to create and use lists when monitoring patients. His lists have been successful with basic procedures by preventing that one tiny slip that can make all the difference.