Automation, Checklists and Cheat Sheets
Scope: The Automating lever in McKeown’s Effortless: doing essential steps without thinking, via checklists, cheat sheets, one-time decisions and technology. It is one of five levers in Residual Results and High-Leverage Levers.
The Premise
McKeown quotes a line he restates as a design rule: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them”—“another way of saying, ‘As many essential steps and activities as possible should be automated.‘” His definition: “Automation is anything that performs a function with minimal human assistance or effort.”
The problem automation answers is cognitive load: “Extreme complexity only increases the cognitive load, making us that much more prone to errors. So what we need is not more knowledge but new skills and strategies that allow us to apply that knowledge without taxing our working memory.”
Three Forms
- Checklists. “The beauty of the checklist is that the thinking has been done ahead of time. It’s been taken out of the equation. Or rather, it has been baked into the equation. So instead of getting these essential things right occasionally, we get them right every time.” They are not only for specialist work such as flying: “As the world gets more complex, we all need tools to help us remember what’s important.”
- Cheat sheets. “The idea of a cheat sheet is simply to get things out of your brain so you can do them automatically, without having to rely on memory.” The lever summary: “Write up a cheat sheet once, and use it every day afterward.”
- One-time decisions. The Richards family vacation story: coordinating many schedules and preferences is “mentally draining and close to impossible,” but a single standing decision made years earlier “eliminated this burden for seven generations… It is automatic and… effortless.” Decisions made once are the cheapest residual result.
Where to Spend Technology
“Consider taking the high-tech, low-effort path for the essential, and the low-tech, high-effort path for the nonessential.”
The selectivity rule is the point: automate what matters, and accept friction on what does not. Writing code once, or hiring someone to write it, means it “will perform the same actions thousands of times.”
Cross-Source Connections
- System 2 Thinking: automation moves a procedure from effortful deliberation to the cheap default, deliberately.
- Essentialism and the Disciplined No: the “Execute” phase of the earlier book (“routines that protect the essential”) is the same instinct.
- Shane Parrish: personal rules (“People question decisions, but they respect rules”) are a one-time-decision tool from a different book.
Checklists, rules and standing decisions are one mechanism
A checklist, a personal rule and a vacation default all move the thinking to a calm moment and reuse it in a tired one. McKeown frames it as effort saved; Parrish’s Clear Thinking frames it as protection against the four defaults. The same device serves both aims.